Lomography’s story is one of Austrian art students, millennial hipsters, and, of course, Vladimir Putin.
At one point, they almost built their own mobile photography app. But instead, Matthias Fiegl and Sally Bibawy decided to stick to their company’s old-school roots. Lomography, a 23-year-old camera company headquartered in Austria, has remained loyal to the art of analog and experimental photography since the beginning, when it first discovered—and then helped popularize—the quirky Lomo LC-A film camera in a shop in Prague. After weathering the onslaught of both digital cameras and the smartphone explosion, Lomography has managed to carve out a durable—and profitable—niche doing things the old-school way: hashtag, no filter.
