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.