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The Ferrania Eura: a basic box camera never looked so stylish (All pics: Stephen Dowling)
The "Italian Kodak" did more than just make film. In its heyday, Ferrania churned out a huge number of cameras alongside its colour and black-and-white films. Many of them were cheap-and-cheerful models aimed at holidaymakers.
And in the 1950s and 1960s, before 35mm went from professional format to consumer staple, many holidaymakers still snapped away on 120 film. Kodak itself had started the ball rolling way back in 1900 with the first Brownie camera, spawning an enormous family of follow-up models.
Other camera makers joined them, and created countless simple 120 models in the decades after World War II, some of them fading into obscurity, some of them becoming household names like the Agfa Clack in West Germany. These cameras were optimised to take pictures in good light on relatively slow film, so they didn't need to have more complicated portrait lenses.
Not all of these cameras took on the dour, utilitarian shape of the Kodak Brownie. The Eura is one camera embracing bold design alongside simple features.
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