A Discovery of Fogg
Monday. Second week of my annual leave. More bliss. Hot and sunny in the morning, but it clouded over by the afternoon. The gang have been busy and industrious. Vanessa spent the afternoon getting her hair done, ready for her Italian holiday on Wednesday. Dash met up with his friends at Rivals escape room in Canterbury; he needed a lift home at three, so I went to collect him. He’s off to another house party tonight — definitely making the most of his summer holidays. Gabriel took Kadience to the station in the afternoon — she’s catching the train back to Manchester in time to get her A-level results on Thursday. I’ve been pottering: writing first thing, gardening second thing, and then later in the morning I started to assemble things — drawers for the new study in this case. During the general sorting-of-stuff that’s been going on, I dug out a box of old camera bags in the garage. I have more room now, and I prefer to keep them inside the house if possible, where it’s always warm and dry. Why do I need to keep multiple empty camera bags? I do not know. No one knows. It is just the way of things.
Anyway, on this occasion, I had a nice surprise: an almost unused Fogg Violin camera bag, in tan leather and canvas; handmade to order, and a thing of beauty. I’ve not used it since I stopped playing with Leicas, back in the old days when I actually had a disposable income — in fact, until today I had forgotten I owned it. Gabriel loved the look of it, and genuinely needs a good camera bag, so it has found a new home. Fogg bags have an interesting bit of lore to them, so here goes...
A short note about Fogg Camera Bags:
I bought this Fogg Violin back in 2007, when carrying a camera generally meant carrying quite a lot of camera. In my case, a couple of rangefinders and several lenses. It was one of the company’s larger ‘Hold-All’ models, roughly 32 centimetres wide and weighing about 1.3 kilograms before anything was put into it. The musical name was part of a range which also included the Flute, Lyre, Viola, Cello and Bass, an unusually coherent little orchestra of camera luggage.
Fogg was founded in 1986 by two South African photographers, bee berman (always in lowercase) and Nigel Fogg. bee had photographed the anti-apartheid movement in Cape Town, while Nigel had been curator of photography at the South African National Gallery. One of bee’s formative experiences came while running during a police raid on a squatter camp: her camera bag turned upside down, scattering equipment and film into the sand as she was arrested. Their list for the ideal replacement began with two simple requirements: it must close quickly, and it must keep hold of its contents while its owner was running (macfilos).
They moved to London in 1985 and worked through twenty prototypes before supplying their first bags to R. G. Lewis the following year. Their original office was a telephone box near the Thames in Hammersmith, where one served as a makeshift desk while the other dealt with suppliers. The bags nevertheless won a Design Centre award in 1986, and in 1992 the couple moved their workshop to rural France. Each bag was made by the two of them using water-resistant cotton drill, vegetable-tanned leather, brass fittings, dense closed-cell foam and a natural linen lining. The Violin is consequently a rather substantial object, but it was built for cameras rather than merely styled to resemble a camera bag.
The business remained almost implausibly small. Old bags could be returned to bee and Nigel for repair, sometimes decades later, and they would replace worn panels or quietly alter weak points rather than declare them finished. bee died in 2023, after which Nigel gradually passed the craft to Leslie Lavielle, who trained with him for more than a year before taking over Fogg in 2024. Nearly twenty years after I bought it, the Violin belongs to a vanishingly rare sort of photographic equipment: made by identifiable people, intended to be repaired, and quite likely to outlast several generations of the cameras placed inside it.
