To everyone who got their hopes up for this new revolutionary camera, that was never my intention. This project originally started as a study on the world of product pirating and the spread of misinformation on the internet for a pirating course. The intention was to see how far the product could grow only for it to be revealed that the whole thing was not real to begin with. Obviously, I knew there was going to be some disappointed people, but overall it seemed like a harmless project. I never expected the project to grow into what it did. This project made me realize there is a large community of photographers who would really look forward to something like this actually existing. Who knows maybe some day someone will see this and make it a reality!

Misinformation.

Fake news - information that is clearly and Intentionally fabricated and has been packaged and then distributed to appear as legitimate news.

you are misinformed.

Misinformation.

PART ONE: If you’ve spent any amount of time with film photography you’ve likely seen cameras like the one featured in this ad. These cameras are called Twin Lens Reflex cameras or TLR’s for short. There are many different brands that made these types of cameras like Yashica or Mamiya, but one brand seems to stand out above the rest. Rolleiflex. The Rolleiflex camera has a cult following unlike any other camera I have seen. These diehard fans spend hours taking photos, developing them and sharing them across social media.

you are fake news.

Misinformation.

PART TWO: Fake news, misinformation, Russian bots are all terms you’ve probably heard before, but we’ve never really taken a step back and studied how easy it is to lie online. To expose this concept, I chose to do the only thing a completely sane photographer could do. I decided to recreate and revive a “dead” camera brand. I wish I could say I spent hours designing some special shape that was the brain child of years of research and collaboration, but I can’t. I just put a bunch of rectangles and octagons together in photoshop to make the outline of the camera. Had I known the scale this project would reach I probably would have spent a bit more time on it.

you are misinformed.

Misinformation.

PART THREE: I had to pick an official release date in order for this charade to seem somewhat real. Since I am a student at Arizona State it only felt fitting for the release date to be April 20th… I’ll let you figure out the significance of that date on your own.

you are fake news.

Misinformation.

PART FOUR: I went to Fujifilm’s website and copied down a lot of the specs for the GFX100s. Most camera brands share so many components already, so it really didn’t seem that far fetched that a new medium format TLR would have similar specs. I mean Look at Sony, their sensors are in most of the cameras we see today. That’s why so many new cameras have similar specs. After I copied down the specs I started working on spec sheets for posts that could be periodically posted as teasers on the twitter page.

you are misinformed.

Misinformation.

PART FIVE: Around this time in the project I got caught. Someone had found Rollei and contacted them directly to ask if the camera was real. They understandably told them it was not and told them to report the page. Im still not quite sure if it was Rollei or if it was just random twitter users, but the account was suspended and the only way I could get it back was to change the name. This obviously meant coming clean to the community I had built, so I did. thankfully most people took the news well and there was even some major news sources reporting on my project.