a blog by Peter Leonard
The pictures I took on a on a 1998 trip to Barcelona, long thought lost to history, were rediscovered recently on a Zip disk sitting at the bottom of a desk drawer I was cleaning out. These pictures are notable not only for the portrait they provide of the genius of Antoni Gaudí and his circle of friends who, as exponents of Modernisme in fin de siècle Catalonia, graced the newly-expanded Eixample district with stunning Art Nouveau buildings, but also as a window into the more recent past; when Kodak's DC120 represented the state-of-the-art in Digital Cameras.
The DC120 was a revolutionary product, offering megapixel resolution at under $1,000.00. We used several of them at the University where I worked, complete with special high-capacity 16mb PCMCIA cards capable of storing dozens of photographs simultaneously. (Of course, after 30 shots, the battery ran out, so you couldn't afford to be too carefree in your shooting.) Borrowing the DC120 for my trip to Spain was a no-brainer -- I wanted to preserve my memories of Barcelona on the highest-tech piece of equipment a purchase-order could buy. But I was also worried the expensive, heavy camera would make me self-conscious walking around...
My fears seemed to be justified, when, barely an hour on the ground in Barcelona, I nearly fell victim to a pick-pocketing on the Ramblas. Exiting the subway station on our way to the hotel, a man stepped in front of me suddenly and dropped his newspaper in a theatrical manner. As he took his time stooping over to pick it up, another man came up behind me, boxing me in between the exit turnstiles. I was burdened with not only my heavy rolling luggage, but also the DC120 in it's ostentatious faux-leather purse, emblazoned KODAK DIGITAL in bright red letters. A jet-lagged tourist, distraction, a bump, and the realization that something was missing -- everything seemed to be unfolding according to their plan.
Not wishing to spend the rest of my trip pining over pilfered camera gear (and uncertain of the excuse I would use on my boss,) I used my New York City Subway etiquette to push past the first man and run out of the station. I'm fairly certain I avoided getting mugged due to my unexpected rudeness, but, on the off chance I knocked over some law-abiding Catalonian for no good reason: Sorry.
Perhaps it will please this same innocent resident of the Ciutat Vella to know that enterprising hackers reverse-engineered the raw data format of the DC120 and discovered that the camera was only capturing 1/2 of the vertical resolution it claimed -- I was trying to protect a camera which was "megapixel" in marketing, not fact.
So, with that in mind, enjoy the pictures in all their blury, JPEG-artifacted glory.