In a quintessential example of representation turned back on itself, Victor Landweber has made photographic apparatus the subject of his American Cameras project—seemingly a collection of portraits for which a camera has sat for the camera. The photographer has chosen his subjects for their unusual names and photogenic faces. The Imperial Debonair, Beacon Two-Twenty Five, and Ansco Panda offer their best expressions to Landweber's own camera (which he tells us was an also-American Graflex XL). Plastic box cameras, manufactured during the 1940s and 50s to satisfy the visual acquisitiveness of the prospering middle class, here enlarged to 16x20 inches, achieve the status of celebrities. Each is separated from its background by a glowing halo, appearing a spectacular apparition, suggesting an exalted specialness though belying the marginal utility of these simplest of cameras. An apparent mania for product differentiation among their manufacturers has made each camera a pastiche of art deco design and eye-catching gimcrackery, masking the underlying similarities among such sub-basic photographic apparatus.

Discussing his working method, Landweber writes: "The chromes and blacks of camera exteriors worked well with Cibachrome’s metallic highlights and deep glossy black. To separate the cameras from their backgrounds in the pre-Photoshop days of the early 1980s, I devised an entirely photographic technique for rimming a camera with light—a hand-cut, black-paper mask, made slightly larger than the outline of the camera and photographed together with the camera on a light table. A separate exposure for the camera and background allowed precise control over the brilliance and sharpness of the glow."

Landweber continues, commenting about the cameras themselves and their place in the history of photographic practice: "By the 1940s and 50s, precision camera manufacture was largely the province of Germany and Japan, while American camera manufacture had largely evolved into ever more baroque variations of George Eastman's original 1888 Kodak. His famous slogan, "You press the button and we do the rest," promised that anyone could make photographs without actually having to learn photography. The irony is that the very limitations of such humble machines (fixed middle-distance focus, slow lens requiring bright sun or flash, slow shutter speed incapable of stopping motion, inaccurate viewfinder) encouraged a photographer to apply a certain discipline to the use of his camera (nothing closer than five feet, frontal mid-morning or mid-afternoon light, static or posed subjects, and the need to frame a subject broadly) that today's users of sophisticated automatic cameras feel free to ignore. Because of this, it often seems that vintage pictures made with simple cameras have a dignity and presence lacking in today's snapshots."