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LOMOgraphy is a profitable business. It makes money on everybody’s desire to be part of the incrowd. To do that, it has to uphold a certain “indie cred”. That’s another way of saying that they’re consciously oblique with the purpose of creating a high threshhold. Go look at their site. It’s clear they’ve made it purposely hard to navigate and understand. Anybody who aspires to be a “true LOMOgrapher” surfs to their site and is supposed not to get it. Then after a while when all becomes clear, he or she feels reinforced, an “insider”, by the accomplishment of understanding their obliqueness. I guess it depends on your point of view whether you call that “marketing” or “manipulation”, but perhaps the two are the same thing.

LOMOgraphy is a profitable business. To keep business going, the Society has to come up with something new every now and then. It started with the LC-A, but the LOMOgraphy Imperium has extended itself to include clothing, online photo services, Chinese cult cameras like the Action Sampler, and parties and get-togethers. More and more, it’s encapsulating their consumers with a pre-fab lifestyle, like your one-stop personality shop.

Damaging in this respect is the way in which they label everything LOMOgraphy, like that St. Petersburg-based factory has anything to do with the business any more. I doubt LOMO minds the exposure, but perhaps they do mind the insinuation that LOMOgraphy is similar to low quality, low tech photography. The whole thing has accentuated the very things LOMO would not like to have accentuated. It’s so respectless to an otherwise very capable company. And now the Society is marketing plastic Chinese cameras under the LOMOgraphy brand name – what’s that all about?

something i have read from this photographer. Sounds interesting isn’t it? Coz everyone of us loves LOMOgraphy :waiting: