What is it?
Soviet/German Zenit camera made in a factory built by German prisoners in Kiev as part of war reparations.
Why does it matter?
In September 1974 I bought a photo enlarger. That summer I had found some work with a student construction brigade in a mining town near the Urals and had saved some money. A week later, my friend Zina convinced me that we should buy a second-hand camera we had spotted in a camera shop. This Soviet Zenit was in fact a German camera made in a factory built by German prisoners in Kiev as part of war reparations.
We loved our precious Zenit and the photos it helped us conjure. We needed them to keep us distracted from each other’s presence, so immediate and overwhelming. We needed them also because words, we suddenly realised, had become mundane and inadequate.
The enlarger was installed in my small hostel room. On Friday nights we would hang a dark sheet over the window, replace the milky white bulb with a red, put up the ‘please don’t disturb’ sign on the door, and start printing from the negatives. During the week, most evenings were consumed developing the negatives, which we dried by hanging them from a little contraption we had fashioned from a washing line acquired from a friend.
The moment that brought us most excitement was the release of exposed photographic paper into a tray filled with liquid developer. Holding the paper with plastic tongs we would wash and rinse it in the liquid, waiting for the black and white image to reveal itself. The print was quickly washed in clean water and dropped in the fixer. The rest—washing, drying, glazing and cutting—was a chore which we both wished to avoid but knew that it had to be got through.
After a few weeks, we were tired of the negatives. One evening Zina asked me to place my thumb in between the light from the enlarger and the photographic paper. In no time the thumb reappeared on the print as a white image surrounded by darkness. We saw it emerge shimmering in the liquid. We had found a new game to indulge ourselves. But it took us only a week to finish experimenting with various objects in my room and so we began looking for new ideas. How about this, said Zina, and removing her bra she placed her left breast under the light. Soon a white roundness manifested itself on the paper. A dome-like shape topped with a greyish grapey knot. ‘This Is Not (My) Breast’ she wrote on the paper and pinned it on the door outside. A few weeks later we found in the library Rene Magritte’s painting of a tobacco pipe with the caption ‘This Is Not a Pipe’. We photocopied the image and pasted it on the door under Zina’s ‘breast’. This was quite a daring feat to perform in a Soviet student hostel. We both were asked to report to the warden, a middle-aged, retired army-nurse, who warned us not to repeat the mistake. After the interrogation only one of the two images was returned to us: Zina’s ‘breast’.
However, grilling by the warden didn’t stop us from making photos. We began experimenting with words. We would perforate words on blank library catalogue cards which we pinched from the library and placed them under the bright light of the enlarger. We also began printing words over the prints made from our own negatives. Our most original work involved Lenin’s famous statue; the one which stands outside the Leningradskii railway station in Moscow. On this statue, just above the waistline, we imprinted the word ИМПОТЕНТ (IMPOTENT). We also liked one of our many quirky collages; this showed curly-haired head of Aleksander Pushkin, the famous Russian poet printed on the unfurled skirt of Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress she wore standing on the subway grating. For its caption we decided to use the first line of Pushkin’s poem, Я вас любил … (I loved You …)
The work in our improvised photo-printing lab was so intense that we hardly talked to each other. There wasn’t any need. The understanding between us was faultless; our actions were in perfect consonance. Yes, we smelt of hypo and our hands were always rough and fingers slimy; we seemed to have turned into a pair of photographic negatives and positives.
We knew that this madness would have to end one day. One can’t bear the onslaught of images in silence. Words have to be let in and allowed to feel at home. They came on the night we made love, after which we looked at each other and words began to speak as if of their own will. In the end we decided that we’ll have to bring an end to our brief but intense relationship. We’ll remain friends, I said. Of course, Zina responded.
The next day, I gave Zina the enlarger as well as Zenit and she let me keep her ‘This Is Not (My) Breast’.
Submitted by: Subhash Jaireth
