SYSTROM: I started taking pictures on the go, when I was around Florence and I would bring it back and he would show me how to develop these photos and they were square, first of all, but they were like slightly blurry and slightly artistic and then he showed me how to add chemicals to the development bath so that it could actually tone the black and white photo with different colors. He soon embraced the simplicity of the Holga. HOFFMAN: With his new toy in hand, Kevin immersed himself in the art and cafe culture of Florence. He’s like, “You have to learn to love imperfection.” It’s got a plastic lens and like, light leaks into the side of it if you’re not careful. SYSTROM: If you haven’t seen a Holga, it’s like a toy camera. HOFFMAN: Charlie had replaced Kevin’s prized professional rig with a simple, cheap Chinese camera known as a Holga. So he gives me this camera and I’m like looking at it, it’s like a toy camera. He’s like, “You’re not allowed to use your camera for the next three months.” And I had like, saved for this thing.
So I did and I thought he was going to tweak with the settings and then he went into the other room came back with a plastic camera. SYSTROM: My professor Charlie looks at me with my camera – which is, I think an embodiment of my personality of perfection – and he looked at me and he was like, “No, no, no. HOFFMAN: Kevin was about to get a lesson that would stay with him forever. SYSTROM: It was like the exact lens you want to use with the sharpest glass that you could get. He came equipped with a very expensive camera. He went to Florence with lofty intentions of creating his own art. And I was like, “Yeah, I want to go to Italy and I love coffee and art.” KEVIN SYSTROM: I decided my junior year, I wanted to study abroad, and honestly I didn’t like languages, but I picked Italian because I was told it was the easiest to pick up, but I fell in love with it and I wasn’t terrible at it.
It was this artistic pedigree – along with the fantastic Italian espresso – that drew a young Kevin Systrom to Florence. Today, art lovers flock to the city to see Michelangelo’s David, Brunelleschi’s duomo, and models of Da Vinci’s flying machine, along with hundreds of renaissance sculptures and frescoes. Set among the cypress trees and the olive groves, art, science and culture flourished here between the 15th and 16th centuries, setting the stage for the modern world.
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