Started in 2000 with a posting on the Internet the group grew quickly from the original three members to what we are today. As our masthead says, the Midwest Large Format Asylum is the largest and most active group of large format photographers in the country. We currently have more than 250 members!
Our members are from Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin with the numbers growing every week. We also have members in Italy and Norway. (Our definition of Midwest is pretty broad!)
We try to plan a group photo outing each month to different places around the Midwest giving large format photographers an opportunity to meet others with the same passion.
We operate this website, an online forum and a mailing list. Most of our outing planning is done on the forum. Click the "Forum" link in the menu to check it out. To fully access all areas of the forum you will need to register. The registration requirement is to combat spammers. Don't worry, it is free and you won't have to divulge personal information (other than your email address).
The forum also contains discussion areas about equipment, film, darkroom info and more. You'll also find our photo galleries there where you can enjoy some truly amazing photography.
The history is best narrated in the words of the starting member, Mike Sherck.
Sometime between 1996 and 1998 I received a small bonus, $200, from my employer. I had been photographing casually for about five years with 35mm and medium format equipment and books by Paul Strand, Imogene Cunningham and Edward Weston excited me and fomented an interest in large format film and cameras. I called Midwest Photo Camera and spoke with Jim, asking him whether they had a large format camera and lens I could buy for $200. He asked me to wait while he rummaged through the back room.
After a short pause he said that they had an Ansco 5x7 camera that looked like it was in decent condition, along with an Ilex Paragon 7 ½"; lens in an Ilex shutter. He'd even throw in a couple of old wooden 5x7 film holders for $200 shipped. I agreed and mailed a money order, then sat down to wait. While waiting I bought some fabric and sewed a dark cloth, by hand with needle and thread, while watching TV in the living room and reading Steve Simmons' "Using the View Camera."
Once I had the camera and had fiddled with it for a while I noticed first, that I had a lot of questions about using it, and second, there didn’t seem to be very many people using these cameras near me. In fact, I had seen one older fellow carrying a large format camera on a tripod over his shoulder from a distance, in the neighboring city to the west. I deduced that there was at least one other since my local camera store, Elkhart Camera, carried both Kodak Tmax 100 and Tmax 400 4x5 film and this didn’t seem to be the kind of place which would have it on the shelf on the off-hand chance that someone would buy it.
The public Internet was still pretty raw at the time, still evolving from its text-based origins as the academic Arpanet, and the World Wide Web hadn't really caught on yet. Most public activity occurred on Usenet, a bulletin board sort of thing divided into different groups for various interests. I created a posting in the rec.photo group, asking whether there were any other large format photographers interested in meeting up to photograph and talk about large format.
I got a number of replies over the course of the net week or so and eventually four of us came up with a plan to meet at Turkey Run State Park, in south-western Indiana, and spend a weekend photographing and hanging out. We met in the parking lot of the lodge in the park and Frank Pittel had the excellent idea of posting a camera tripod on top of his car as a rally point. He and I were joined by two others and I am sad to say that I can't remember which two. I deeply, deeply apologize for forgetting.
Turkey Run turned out to be an excellent idea and a top notch recommendation from the photographer from Indianapolis whom I can't remember. We ended up returning there several times over the next few years, our numbers growing each time. One fine spring weekend we woke up early to find that either rain or condensation had frozen in the night and the park's stone steps leading down into steep ravines were coated with a beautiful transparent film of ice, now beginning to melt in the warming day. Naturally cautious about carrying our expensive cameras, lenses, etc. down such slippery ways we instead formed a human chain leading down the face of the cliff to the bottom of the ravine and passed the precious equipment down one bag at a time. As the less precious and possibly less self-aware components of the expedition, we each made our ways down on our own.
Later in the morning when we had returned to the top we paused to reflect on the day and discuss the wisdom or forming a more or less formal group and someone, I don't know who, said that one had to be insane to have climbed an ice covered cliff just to get to the bottom and take pictures and there was another remark that mentioned the work "asylum" and that's where the name Midwest Large Format Asylum came from.
In later discussion I mentioned that I had noticed that large format photographers didn’t seem very gregarious, especially while photographing. I thought that a formal organization with rules, officers, etc. would discourage as many or more photographers as it would attract and that we shouldn’t have any of that. The others agreed and the group has worked out pretty well with that lack of organization. We agreed to meet for an outing, somewhere, on the third weekend of the month, unless we decided to do something else. All we asked is that if someone proposed a site for an outing, that they had previously been there before. Frank, or maybe it was Sherman, built a website with a forum in which we could chat and arrange outings and membership grew far past what any of us had anticipated. At one point a fellow from Italy asked whether they could join and we responded, sure, why not? Our definition of “Midwest” was pretty broad.