Clare 026

My photography project is not just about frames but also about prescription lenses. It would be a bit silly to have models posing in frames with plano lenses or even worse, in empty frames. After all, it's the lenses that bring vision to people wearing prescription glasses. The lenses bring real life into the portraits. From my schooldays I always wondered why opticians and brands are always advertising with pictures of empty frames. It's a silly contradiction which never changed. Perhaps it has to do with the eternal but pointless quest for perfection. In my view, it's far more realistic to let models show glasses with prescription lenses. Perfect imperfection is more interesting than sterile so called perfection. Nobody is perfect and it's often the small imperfections that make a person unique.

In this series, lovely Clare is showing one of the most unusual glasses from my entire collection. It puzzles me why the first owner of these Menrad glasses made the choice to have the frame fitted with myodisc lenses. There was no need. The prescription is far too low for myodisc lenses. It's even more surprising that the "bowls" have a diameter of only 28 millimeters. A full decade earlier, myodisc bowls in glasses were larger than that. The man in question must have had an unnecessary limited peripheral vision wearing these glasses. Anyway, whatever his motives were, it's an interesting pair of glasses. The lenses are not made of plastic but of glass. I wonder if the right lens (-10.00) was used for long distance and the left lens (-7.00) for close work. That would make sense as myodisc bifocals did not exist 45 years ago.

The unusually low position of the bowls is another puzzle. When Clare put the glasses on, she was clearly hesitating where to look. The bowls gave her better vision than the positive carrier lenses but she was inclined to look through the carrier lenses. Here she is looking at the demarcation between the bowl and the carrier lens.