Article in today's NY Times on "images of 272 heroes, survivors and relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have been captured on film by a longtime Life magazine photographer, Joe McNally, using the world's biggest Polaroid camera with a lens from a U-2 spy plane."

http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI=http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/arts/design/01POLA.html

-- Donald Brewster (dpbrewster@prodigy.net), November 01, 2001

Answers

Terrific article. thanks for the reference. The camera being used was written up in some depth recently in View Camera.

-- Ellis Vener Photography (ellis@ellisvener.com), November 02, 2001.

Cool article and shoot - Joe is a great guy. I did a workshop wiht him a few years back and we still keep in touch - I didn't know he had gone this big!

He is usually known for his hi tech/science stories in National Geo etc, be he is a great street photographer too - and an excellent teacher.

I wonder if the lens is one of those great Canadian Elcan lenses? We still make the best spy plane/sattelite and Leica lenses! (gotta love the Lecica M 90mm f1!). I never thought of hunting down old surveillance lenses for LF - hmmm

Tim A

-- Tim Atherton (tim@KairosPhoto.com), November 02, 2001.

The lenses used for this camera and for the 20x24 Polaroid cameras were designed by Polaroid for the U-2 camera. I believe the one for the giant one of a kind camera McNally used for his project are two of these lenses used back to back, buti'm paraphrasing from the View Camera article on these cameras.

-- Ellis Vener Photography (ellis@ellisvener.com), November 03, 2001.

Any idea when exactly this article appeared in View Camera? Thanks.

-- Julie Yoo (julieyoo285@yahoo.com), May 29, 2002.