Founded by a working photojournalist who got tired of sending cameras to Athens and waiting three weeks.
The shop opened on Tsimiski because that is where the photographers already were. The first room was the front counter and a shelf of used bodies. The second floor came later, and with it the thing that actually defines us: we fix and develop on the premises.
Fifteen years on, the counter is still the point. People come in to handle equipment, to ask whether the thing they want is the thing they need, and often to be told it is not.
We do not sell equipment we would not service. We do not describe a fault as character. We do not stock C-grade lenses with front element haze, because the saving never survives contact with the pictures.
We would rather lose a sale than have something come back in six months and be right about it.
The film lab has grown faster than anything else, which nobody here predicted in 2011. The darkroom now opens on Saturdays and weekday evenings, and a good part of the people using it were not born when the last one in this city closed.