Nikomat El Camera

San Francisco, 1976

This beauty was my first serious camera. I bought it slightly used from my friend Bill Parker. Parker is sculptor who creates artworks with light, electricity, and plasma; he was a colleague of mine when I worked at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1974 and 1975. Bill had bought it in Japan, so it’s called a “Nikomat” instead of a “Nikkormat”—I’m not clear exactly why.

Four years later, in September 1979, I was trekking alone in Nepal’s Annapurna range. This was long before the road was put in; today you can drive all the way from Pokhara to Tibet, and onward to Beijing. But back in those days, the trail was so steep and narrow that you had to watch every step. Many trekkers hired local porters, sometimes even donkeys. Not me. At 25—muscular and fit—I scorned the use of porters. No need; my backpack weighed only 50 lbs.

I had left the hilltop village of Ulleri, and was quickly and confidently descending a long, precipitous procession of smooth slate steps. It was early in the morning, and they were slick with dew. The trail, following a ridge, turned sharply. Suddenly, I slipped. My body pitched forward, off the edge of trail, the mass of my backpack plunging me head first into a V-shaped gap between two huge boulders.

This Nikomat was hanging around my neck by a black leather strap. It swung into the V before me. My head followed right behind. The shallow dent at the top of the camera is the exact spot where my chin slammed into the prism casing. The sturdy camera, wedged into the V like a brick, prevented my skull from being crushed like a walnut.

I was briefly trapped, nearly upside down, in the narrow crevasse. Two passing Sherpas pulled me out. My left arm was scraped up and bleeding, but that was all. One of my rescuers used his fist to hammer the camera out from below. Aside from the bruised prism casing, the only other damage was a shattered UV filter.

The Nikomat still worked perfectly, and continued to serve as my main professional camera for the next 15 years. The shallow dimple was a continual reminder that it had once literally saved my life. It’s very unlikely that my current camera—an iPhone 7—would do me the same favor.