October 2025 - Blind Magazine
October 3, 2025
By Jonas Cuénin
In 1975, while still a student, David Katzenstein stumbled upon an ol Kodak Duaflex at a yard sale in New London, Connecticut. “I purchased it for 25 cents,” he recalls. It wasn’t meant to replace his Leica M3, the camera he used for his daily work, but rather to challenge his ey and force new ways of seeing. With its fixed focus and waist-level finder, the Duaflex offered him a radically different tool – one that valued instinct over control and intuition over precision. “I thought that by trying to photograph with the Duaflex I could experiment with the limitations of this fixed focus camera to create a body of work totally different from what I was creating with the Leica,” he says.
This experiment would grow into a decade-long project – and ultimately a book, Brownie, published nearly 50 years later. It is a story not just of a camera, but of an artist learning to embrace constraint…
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