Category: Diary

Before the radio club, there was a photography one.

Somewhere around fourth grade, I got a “Smena-Symbol” — Russian 35 mm film camera, and I started attending a photography club. It was located on the top, 4th floor of the school building, in the far corner of the far wing, opposite the classroom for initial military training. Gas masks and terrifying diagrams showing the deadly force of a nuclear explosion hung on the walls of the military training room, but behind the door across the hall, it was always quiet, warm, dark, and cozy.

Not a single frame came out from my first roll of film. That day, we went outside when it was still light, but the last frames were taken by the light of the street lamps — it gets dark early in winter. The school is next to the train station, and near it, there’s a huge old steam engine — black locomotive with a big red star and a little further — two old water towers. We took pictures of them, and posed in front of them. We were carried away, having fun, posing, goofing around, and walking around the area looking for more things to shoot to finish the film as quickly as possible.

My camera couldn’t do anything automatically, and I had to learn to set all the parameters “by eye.” This camera wasn’t a reflex and I couldn’t see the actual sharpness of the shot. I focused, estimating the approximate distance to the object. I didn’t have any kind of photo exposure meter, and I had to determine the shutter speed and aperture based on the weather and time of day. All of this was very difficult, and I had to go through many rolls of film to get at least a few printable shots out of 36.

I had to learn how to load the exposed film into the developing tank in complete darkness, by touch, without scratching the emulsion or leaving fingerprints on it. How to mix chemicals at certain temperatures. After developing, washing, and drying the film, we carefully transferred the image to paper using an enlarger in a darkroom lit by a red lamp, blowing away each speck of dust as we worked.

After we figured out how to set up the camera, develop the film, and print it, it was time to delve into lighting schemes and frame composition.
To go through all these stages and get a print worthy of placing in an album, you had to consider a lot of little details. And you never know what you will get. You can only see the final result in detail after you shoot the entire roll — all 36 frames of the film, develop it, print one of them and take it out of the red room into the light.

The club leader was the first teacher in my life who made us pay attention to all these little details. Like us, he was passionate about photography and teaching. Thanks to that school hobby, I became more attentive to my surroundings.
He gave us assignments, one of which was to find a monument or bust by the address of the house next to it — and take a photo. To get the right lighting, you had to take the picture at a specific time of day and in specific weather.

This opened up new places you never knew about, or simply hadn’t noticed before, and over time it became a permanent subject of your photographs.
Later, a photo lab similar to the one at school appeared at my home. My parents gradually bought me all the necessary supplies, a red lamp, and a simple enlarger called “Yunost”. I installed all this stuff in the bathroom and locked myself in so no one in the family would accidentally expose the photo paper.

I really loved the smell of film and chemicals. Even the camera itself was completely saturated with a special scent that I’ll never forget. It was a mix of the natural leather of the case, grease, metal, paint, and film. All of it was incredibly real and tangible, and the red lamp light created a magical atmosphere of transformations and chemical reactions.

I still feel some kind of magic in it. Captured light, a sequence of specific actions — and you hold in your hands a slightly distorted copy of reality. For me, this copy is especially valuable because it’s much sharper and contains more details than what I see through my glasses. I have had poor eyesight since early childhood, but I can see well up close, and I enjoy looking at the details that appear on printed photographs. You start to see the world better and seem to understand it more deeply. It becomes closer, and through these photos, you accept it, and all this becomes a part of you.

Photographic paper isn’t sensitive to red light, and photographic film is less sensitive to it than to other colors. That’s why you can print in red light, and everything that’s red in life turns black in the world of black-and-white photography. All amateur photography was black and white back then. Many families, including ours, had only black-and-white televisions for a long time. The only bright colors that remained in memories are the vivid lemon-yellow whitewash of the walls of our apartment and this red lantern.

I spent my childhood in the city of Kurgan, in its courtyards, squeezed between five-story buildings from the Khrushchev era, near the railway, permeated with the smell of sleepers, the whistles of trains, and the booming echo of dispatchers’ nightly roll calls. As a child, I felt this city was the biggest and most beautiful. I hadn’t seen any others.

The city was filled — each street had its own mood. Completely unclear how some mood and place were connected, but often, immersed in some state or emotion, I mentally found myself on a certain street or in some courtyard.

One short street stretched from the Central to the Suburban railway station had an expressive mood — it would come to mind when I was sad or scared. The parallel street was a little more peaceful and bright. Then, there was the central street named after Gorky, which runs through the main square where, of course, a monument to Lenin stands, along with the Palace of Pioneers. This street had a completely different feel — cozy, festive, and warm. Later, I spent many pleasant and interesting hours on this street, and most of my warm memories are associated with it. A few blocks down was the Tobol River, and beyond that, the summer cottages known as dachas. For me, the city essentially ended there.

Six entrances with benches occupied by pensioners, garbage bins, someone else’s kindergarten, two transformer boxes, a heating main, one pedestrian crossing, and a long diagonal across the yard—and you were at school. The road from school to home and back was made of dirt underfoot and fantasies in my mind. Sometimes I caught myself not remembering the journey. I would simply find myself at home or at school, with no memory of what lay between. Nothing seemed to happen on the way — no events, no faces. And in winter, it was very slippery and cold.

Memories from different places aren’t synchronized or connected in any way. Each belongs solely to the place where it happened. It was as if, when I moved to a new place, I lived another life. I will never remember what happened at school once I started going to the radio club.

I only remember how, at the end of the summer, my mother took me to the large columns of the Palace of Pioneers, where posters with lists of clubs and sections were hanging, and said: “Here, let’s choose.”

— What’s the first thing you remember?
— Oh, let’s see…The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?
— No – the first thing you remember.
— Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago.
— You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?
— Oh. I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question

© Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, 1966

Through the noise, interference and extraneous thoughts, a distant, black-and-white picture gradually appears. It could be the first memory.

There is a winter frosty morning, snow and bright sunlight. Mom holds my hand — we are going to kindergarten. The sun is opposite, near the horizon, somewhere above the fences and warms the frozen cheeks.

All memories are linked to certain locations in the space of the city. Each the memory has its own place and its own atmosphere. Mentally diving into them, I watch emerging details. But the older the memory is, the more difficult it is to determine what is real in these details and what is not. Over time, all the past is overgrown with fantasies, completed by the stories of relatives or friends, supplemented by their attitude, interpretations and ideas about me.

The most real and honest is the feeling of the importance and significance of happening. And feeling of my exclusivity. There is something more behind everything that happens around me, while I am a child. The world is filled with mystery, and mystery is present in everything around me, and manifests itself silently, in inactivity of things.

Everything turns into a ritual and acquires some special purpose.

The usual TAG game suddenly becomes a part of the plan to save the world. “The secrets” buried in the ground have a mystery, much more than just candy wrappers hidden under fragments of colored glasses. And young spring buds of trees can give you superpower or cure you of a terrible disease. After all, no one has eaten these buds before you, but you are eating — and something must definitely happen after that. Something important.

This childish perception of the world is the most valuable of the lost superpowers. Now I’m trying to get it back and reconcile it with my current present. Understand what was behind everything that happened next. What was the reason for this feeling of fullness and completeness.

—

Some of the earliest and most vivid memories: the first loss — a machine gun forgotten on the children’s slide, the first question – “Why?” and the first love, which for some strange reason came in a dream.

With a machine gun, everything is simple: I lost it and was very sad about this. I don’t remember which way I got it, but I was very happy, played all morning, and left it on the slide, in the playground, when everyone was called for dinner. It was battery powered, made sounds of shots, flashed a red light on the muzzle, and something was moving inside. When I recollected that i had such interisting thing and we went to look for him, he was nowhere to be found. I felt very sorry and offended. Although it may not even have been my toy. Perhaps It was the reason why it disappeared so suddenly.

I remember the first question in a little more detail. It was in the same place, in the kindergarten. Among the trees, sandpits and slides stood a car welded from rods and sheets of iron, covered with several layers of peeled paint. It must have been a convertible, because instead of a roof, it had only a frame. With wheels, wented deep into the sand, and the cold and heavy steering wheel could be turned endlessly in one direction or another. A couple of kids were in the passenger seat, and I was driving. I was rushing somewhere, imitating the roar of an engine, carrying my passengers, but at some point I raised my head up and beyond the frame of the missing roof I saw the sky and poplar branches closing over me. I froze, and the question arose from somewhere — “Why?”.

Why am I making these sounds? Where are we going?
Why is all this happening now?

But my passengers began to worry and start bringing me back to the life:

— Hey! Well, what are you? Let’s go, we’ll be late!

I didn’t come up with answers to these questions then, and it seems that I still continue this simple and understandable game — to imitate the adult world, still hoping that in this game, or in this world, the meaning exists. And someday it will definitely open up to us.

What about first love? I would talk about it next time.