Kevin Twomey is creating quite a name for himself with his photography of vintage adding machines. What his photographs help to portray is the mechanical complexity to which numbers could be added up to infinity, through a physical and extravagantly designed solution. This setup was commonplace for many decades and now with the advent of hi tech computing these mechanical devices have gone the way of the dinosaur due to their singular function, weight and inability to compete in today's market place of apps on mini computers.
Check out more of Kevin Twomey's work
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| Kevin Twomey's photo of a vintage Adding Machine |
They may seem like Rube Goldberg machines today, but mechanical adding
machines were considered the closest thing to computers not long ago:
heaps of gears, levers, and springs engineered to do the work of a $3
calculator. The San Francisco–based photographer Kevin Twomey has produced a wonderful series of these mechanical relics, selected from a collector’s private stash.
“The community of people who collect this cumbersome,
not-so-valuable, obsolete machinery is pretty small,” Twomey tells
Co.Design. Nonetheless, his research quickly led him to Mark Glusker, a
collector and mechanical engineer living just a few miles from the
photographer’s studio who agreed to bring over a few prized pieces. “As
we laid them out on tables, Mark pulled off the covers on some of the
machines to show me the guts,” Twomey recalls. “Instantly I knew what
this project was about: the intricate and complex inner workings of
these machines.”
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| Kevin Twomey's photos show the depth and soul of a vintage adding machine |
He used hot lights to illuminate the details: “Arri hot lights have a
crispness about them, so when objects like these machines are bathed in
that kind of light, they just sing,” he says. And his affection for
vintage technology extends to his own choice of equipment: a Hasselblad.
“I am still in love with the older Carl Zeiss lenses.”
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| Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine |
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| Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine |
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| Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine |
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| Kevin Twomey photograph of vintage adding machine |
