Five Frames With: The Nikon FM2 That's Logged 30 Years, One Divorce, and Every Mile of Route 66
Photo: skinnylawyer from Los Angeles, California, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Five Frames With is a new series from Shoot35 about the cameras that refuse to die — the one mechanical body that's been through weddings, moves, breakdowns, and three decades of road trips with the person who never put it down. For our first installment, we talked to Diane Kowalski, 58, a retired high school art teacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her 1984 Nikon FM2.
Frame One: Where did this camera come from?
"My dad bought it for me when I graduated from college in '84. He was a machinist and he liked that it was all metal — he turned it over in his hands at the camera shop and said, 'This one's built like us.' It cost him more than he told me at the time. I found the receipt years later in the box. I still have the box.
"It's been to forty-some states. It fell in the Colorado River in '91. Dried it out on the dashboard, shot the rest of that roll, and the frames came back fine. Nikon built a tank and then pretended it was a camera."
Frame Two: You shot your whole Route 66 trip on it?
"Twice, actually. Once in '95 with my husband, once in 2016 with my daughter after the divorce. Same camera, same highway, twenty-one years apart. I stood in the same spot outside Tucumcari both times. The first photo has him in it, leaning against the car. The second one is just the car and the light. Those two frames hanging next to each other in my hallway are the most honest photographs I've ever taken."
Frame Three: The camera was there for the hard stuff too.
"It was. The divorce, the funeral, the years I didn't want to pick up any camera at all. There's something about a fully mechanical body — it doesn't need anything from you except your hands. No battery panic, no menu, no updating. In the worst year of my life, that camera was the one thing that worked exactly the same as it always had. I shot a roll of Tri-X that winter that I still haven't scanned all the way through. But I'm glad I have it."
Frame Four: Two graduations on the same body?
"Both my kids, yes. My son in 2013, my daughter in 2019. I shot digital at both because I had to — you need the volume at those things, everyone wants copies. But the frame that's on my wall from each day, the one that actually means something, is the Portra frame from the FM2. My kids know the ritual now. When mom switches cameras, it's about to be the real one."
Frame Five: Why never replace it?
"People offer me newer cameras. My daughter tried to buy me one of those fancy digital ones a few Christmases ago. I told her thank you, but the FM2 already knows everything about me. Thirty years of road trips, two kids, one marriage, one divorce, one river. A camera is just a box that lets light in, but this box has been open for every important light of my life.
"Besides, dad was right. It's built like us. A few dents, still working."
Diane's FM2 wears its history openly — brassing on the corners, a hand-grip worn smooth, a strap her husband bought in 1989 that she never replaced. "The repairman in Denver offered to repaint it once," she told me as we finished up. "I said absolutely not. The paint is the resume."
Have a camera that's been through everything with you? We're looking for the next Five Frames With. Write to us — the beat-up bodies with the long stories are the ones we want.
