Jack White is like a character from a Coen brothers movie as he leans against his ’50s Thunderbird, dressed in red and black, holding a hard-shell camera case.

Like a mysterious, gaudy courier, he walks across the steakhouse parking lot in the bright autumn sun. White leaves his thin cigar on a low wall and steps into the restaurant’s bar, at ease among the mid-afternoon regulars even though he stands out like a toucan in a chicken coop.

In a corner booth, The White Stripes’ singer and guitarist orders a Glenfiddich on the rocks and opens the case.

“You seen this? … This is my camera,” Jack White says.

He extracts accessories one after another and lays them on the table — boxes of peppermint-pattern filters, a fisheye lens, a roll of 120 film, a manual with a camera-headed monkey on the cover. And the centerpiece, a customized White Stripes model of the cheap plastic ’80s-vintage Holga camera, in red and white with “JACK … The White Stripes” printed on the top.

There’s a Meg camera too, for Stripes drummer Meg White.

Both of the cameras are packaged in custom boxes designed by the Stripes’ visual collaborator, Rob Jones, and sold through their Web site and at photo retailers, in a limited edition of 3,000 each. They’re part of the Austria-based photo subculture known as lomography, which encourages members to document their worlds by shooting fast and furiously.

It’s kind of the garage rock of the photography world, with a “cheaper-simpler” philosophy that appeals strongly to Jack White, 32.

A card-carrying member of the National Geographic Society, White monitors the world’s vanishing traditions, from indigenous tribal languages to film cameras.

The White Stripes led the charge of “garage rock” into prominence during the past decade, but right now the band’s future is cloudy following an abrupt cancellation of its tour amid concerns over Meg White’s health.

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