Confessions of a Cameraholic

A Weekly Column By Mike Johnston
© Mike Johnston 2002
I became aware recently of the work of a photographer named Wade Heninger. Wade, whom I don't know personally at all, photographs in black-and-white with a Konica Hexar RF and a Leica 50mm Summicron. It's all he owns. His pictures are simple, low-key, elegant, undemonstrative, and quite fine.

Wade Heninger, portrait by Jeffery Smith(taken with a Konica Hexar RF Limited and 50mm f/1.2 KM-Hexanon lens, wide open)
Recently, I overheard him on a mailing list ruminating about maybe getting a 28mm lens.
Nothing at all unusual or alarming about that, right? Yet, when I read it, it made by blood run cold. No, it's not that I have a thing for 50mm lenses. It's that the guy has an interesting, unusual vision. To me, it seems all of a part with black-and-white and with the odd neither-here-nor-there angle of view of the 50mm. His methods are simple and direct. And to my reading of the situation, at least, he's unusual in that, unlike ...