Foma Bohemia is a Czech manufacturer that has been making black and white photographic materials for over a century. It’s the first brand we chose to import, and this is why.

Since 1921

Foma Bohemia grew out of a small photographic lab founded in Prague in 1919, and was established in Hradec Králové in 1921 under the name Fotochema. Black and white paper went into production in 1931, roll film in the early 1930s. The factory supplied much of Eastern Europe with film for decades, rebuilt after a fire destroyed its main production hall in 1955, and was privatised in 1995, taking the Foma name it had long exported under.

It still develops its own emulsions and coats its own film in the same city, which today puts it among the few remaining black and white film manufacturers.

Why we started with them

Truth exists because film in South Africa costs too much. Foma films cost meaningfully less than the big names, and the films hold their own: classic cubic grain, gentle tonality, the look many people shoot film for in the first place. Foma doesn’t imitate modern tabular-grain films, they make traditional film.

What we import

The three Fomapan negative films in 35mm, 120 and 4x5 sheets, Fomapan R100, one of very few black and white slide films still in production, Retropan 320 Soft for a vintage look, and the chemistry to develop all of it.