A police force needs a photograph of a face, upright, the same size every time, thousands of them a year. In the early 1980s the Norwegian police wanted a camera that would do this on 35mm film without turning the camera on its side, because a flash sits on top of a camera and a face lit from the side is a different face. The answer to that problem is a half frame: an 18 by 24 millimetre gate, tall instead of wide, seventy-two pictures on a roll of thirty-six.
Nikon had never made one. The Pen F was Olympus’s, and Nikon’s only half-frame anything was the S3M rangefinder of 1960, a few hundred cameras for a newspaper’s motor-drive experiment. But Nikon had the FM2, a mechanical body with a 1/4000 shutter that would do whatever a police workshop asked of it, and it had a bayonet with every lens a photographer could want. So Nikon took the order. The Nippon Kogaku Klub, which has the most detailed account, puts it at 150 cameras, in 1983.
What Nikon built
What a half-frame FM2 needs is not much: a new film gate, one piece, with the aperture turned upright; a mask in the finder so the photographer sees what the film sees; and a change in the transport so the lever moves the film half as far and the counter runs to seventy-two. Nikon did not do this on its own lines. It gave the job to a small workshop in Tokyo and supplied the parts, and the workshop did the work by hand.
The result is invisible from outside. Stephen Gandy, who handled one in 2003, wrote that it carried no exterior half-frame marking of any kind, and that a buyer could easily mistake it for an ordinary FM2. Inside, the finder’s edges are blacked out to a vertical window on a standard screen, and the gate is a purpose-made casting rather than a stock gate with a mask. The one the Klub photographed is body 7215302, an early FM2 with the 1/200 sync.
Then the workshop stopped. The Klub’s version is that the job took far longer than it had been priced at, and after thirty-nine cameras the workshop declined to make more. A collector on the Camera Collector board tells the same story from the other side: Nikon stopped the order because it was costing more to produce than it could possibly make. Nikon delivered the finished cameras to Norway together with the parts for the rest of the order, and washed its hands of it.
How many finished cameras there were depends on who is counting. Thirty-nine, says the Klub. Thirty-four, says McKeown’s price guide. Twenty-nine delivered to Norway, said a Catawiki seller in 2020. I carry all three on the family page, because they are three counts of the same small pile and none of them is Nikon’s.
What Norway built
The importer, Interfoto, had a box of Nikon parts and an unfinished order. It finished it. A Norwegian classified for one of these cameras names the technician, Terje Linde, and the collector who owns the example Will pointed me to describes how: Interfoto had Nikon’s permission and Nikon’s finder masks and transport parts, but where the Tokyo workshop had fitted a one-piece gate, Interfoto masked a standard one, because that was the cost the Japanese conversion had failed on. About forty were made this way, on FM2 and later FM2n bodies, which is why an N-prefix serial can turn up on one.
That makes perhaps eighty half-frame FM2s in the world, and the police used them. When they were done they destroyed most of them, as institutions do with equipment. The collector who has spent years counting knows of five in Norway and two abroad from the Interfoto batch. One appeared on eBay in late 2014 asking $4,000. Collectiblend puts the model at ten times the price of a standard FM2, which is a way of saying that it sells so rarely nobody knows.
Why I like it
Gandy made the observation that stays with me. For a year or two, these few dozen bodies made Nikon the largest half-frame system in the world, larger than the Pen F with its own line of Zuikos, because every Nikkor fits an FM2. Nobody planned that. Nobody at Nikon would have wanted it said. It is true anyway, and it is the kind of truth this catalog exists to keep: a camera that was never a product, that Nikon never mentioned, that exists because a Tokyo workshop gave up at thirty-nine and a Norwegian importer had a box of parts.
One thing I cannot settle. The Klub says the order came from the Norwegian army. Everyone else says the police, and the purpose, upright identity photographs, is police work. I have gone with the police and recorded the disagreement. If you have a Norwegian document that says otherwise, the corrections address is at the foot of every page.