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A New York City-based photographer has won a major international monochrome photography contest using a massive, 95-year-old antique wooden camera.
Joshua YeheNara, who specializes in the wet plate collodion process and large-format film photography, was crowned Photographer of the Year at the 2026 Exposure One Awards for a series of black-and-white frames he shot on an 11×14 Deardorff studio camera.
Produced by the L.F. Deardorff Camera Company in Chicago between the 1930s and 1980s, the 11×14 Deardorff Studio Camera (also called the S11) is a heavy-duty large-format rig for professional portraiture, commercial illustration, and wet-plate collodion photography.
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“The camera itself weighs 45 pounds, while its original studio stand weighs approximately 350 pounds,” said YeheNara.
Deardorff cameras were designed to be modular, with an interchangeable back component – where the film is held – enabling shooting with different film sizes. Yehenara explained that he captured his award-winning images on Ilford Delta 100 black-and-white film, mounted within a 10×14-inch back.
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Joshua YeheNara owns three Deardorff studo cameras, an 11×14-inch S11 along with two modified (8×20-inch and 11×28-inch) panoramic cameras (Image credit: Joshua YeheNara)
According to the photographer, Deardorff studio cameras are incredibly rare, with “fewer than 350” ever made. Yet somehow, YeheNara has managed to acquire three of them.
“I found the first one on the Facebook Marketplace and purchased [it] from a collector in Massachusetts for $4,500,” he said.
While one of the models is a standard S11, Yehenara explained that the other two have been modified to make them panoramic. “The 8×20 and 11×28 [-inch] backs were custom-made for me by the previous owner,” he said.
“I am currently the only known photographer to own both an 8×20-inch and an 11×28-inch panoramic Deardorff studio camera.”
Yehenara’s winning frames at the Exposure One Awards came from a series called Zen-Organic Photography for the Digital Age. You can see his winning images, along with all commended images from this year’s contest, on the Exposure One Awards website.
Here’s our in-house analog expert Seb Oakley’s take on the best film cameras. Seb, who mostly shoots monochrome, also has a roundup of the best cameras for black-and-white photography.