There are around a hundred million unused film cameras in Europe. They were designed to be repaired. Without someone who knows how, they will die.
Juho Leppänen decided to be that someone.
A store with a mission
Juho's first memory of photography is the Grand Canyon. He was six or seven, and his father handed him the family camera, bought in Hong Kong in 1987, and said: you take a photo. He still has that camera.
In high school, he bought lots of old lenses and bodies to keep one lens for his digital Nikon and sell the rest. Camera shops were dying, and nobody served the film community. At 21, with university as the sensible option, he started Kamerastore in Tampere instead. It began in the living room, the same week he got married.
When the team fell in love with shooting film themselves, the company found its purpose. They launched the Camera Rescue Project with a goal of rescuing 100,000 cameras. They reached it in Finland in May 2021, five months late. Today the count is close to 300,000.
Keeping the knowledge alive
Training a camera mechanic takes two to three years. Kamerastore found older masters willing to teach. In the first year, one of them went home on a Friday and didn't come back on Monday. It was a reminder that the know-how would disappear within a decade or two unless it was passed on.
In economic terms, Juho calls it a very dumb company: paying people while they learn, growing slowly, without banks that want to fund old cameras. It works anyway. On the day we filmed, 160 orders were going out.
Built to last
Juho's bigger point is about design. Kamerastore works with products that can be a hundred years old and still do what they were made for. Most things today, he says, are designed to last three to five years. He would like to see dishwashers and lawnmowers built for fifty or a hundred years, with business models that make that profitable.
He also thinks about memory. Digital photography gave us unlimited freedom, and that freedom has emptied the meaning of a photo. Photos from roughly 2003 to 2013 are already hard to reach, stuck on old phones and hard drives. Once a year, Juho prints the family's photos, and his kids sort them into piles for the grandparents.
In 50 years, that's the only photo that matters.
Why I made this film
I have considered myself a photographer for twenty years, but film always felt a bit scary. Juho handed me the camera from the Grand Canyon. I took one photo, felt the mechanical shutter and was hooked. After three frames, I bought my own film camera.
The film follows Juho from Tampere to a pop-up store at the Paris Olympics. What stayed with me was simpler: a photo isn't a memory until you do something with it. I'm going to start printing mine.
Read the original article about Camera Rescue.
The question this film answers: what happens if you don't follow the expected path?