Diana Camera. The Diana Show: Pictures Through a Plastic Lens.

Friends of Photography, 1980, issued as Untitled 21. Softcover catalog of an exhibit with 80 photographs, more than 40 of which are reproduced one to a page. Includes exhibit checklist. Photographers include James Alinder, Larry S. Ferguson, Nancy Rexroth, Lauren Shaw, Cindy Sirko, Joanne Tracy, Sharon Watkins, Graydon Wood, et al. Fine with small crimp along spine. Summary:

he Diana Show: Pictures Through a Plastic Lens (1980) is an exhibition catalog published as Untitled 21 by the Friends of Photography (Carmel, California) to document a national juried exhibition dedicated entirely to photographs taken with the low-cost, plastic Diana camera.

Key Details & Highlights

• Publisher & Format: Published in 1980 by the Friends of Photography as a 56-page softcover volume (Untitled 21), edited by David Featherstone. It features 80 black-and-white plates selected from over 1,500 submissions.

• Core Subject: Highlights the creative possibilities of the Diana camera—a cheap, plastic toy camera manufactured in Hong Kong known for its light leaks, vignetting, soft focus, and unpredictable optical distortions.

• Curatorial Theme: Challenges the traditional photographic emphasis on high-tech precision and technical perfection by celebrating expressive intuition, painterly surrealism, and accidental abstraction.

• Featured Artists: Includes works by notable fine-art photographers who embraced the toy camera aesthetic, including Nancy Rexroth (pioneer of the genre), Mark Eden Horowitz, Eric Renner, Patrick Nagatani, and Joe Deal.

• Significance: Serves as a landmark publication in validating toy camera and lo-fi photography within the institutional fine-art community, directly paving the way for the modern Lomography and toy camera art movements.