2017
Early in 2017 I spotted a Moskva 4 on the Camera Traders website in Victoria for $100. I phoned them right away, gave them my Visa number and in a few days I had the Moskva 4 in my hands. It is a Russian, Sputnik-era folding camera that creates a 6 cm by 9 cm negative. The lens, the shutter and the rangefinder work well. All the words on it are written in Russian, which helps make this camera more unique. Very cool. Unfortunately, because there is some distance between the shutter button and the leaf shutter in the lens, the mechanism requires more pressure than usual. Hence, it can be difficult to keep the camera from moving slightly when shooting handheld. While pondering how to solve this problem I remembered I had an old squeeze bulb shutter release with a long rubber tube buried in the bottom of a drawer.
As you can imagine, setting up the camera on a tripod and rolling out the long tube takes some time. However, this unusual procedure became a sort of ritual that led to a different way of composing and a different type of reaction from my subjects. With the bulb and tube included in the scene, the photograph became partly about taking the photograph. Once or twice, as I went through the rigamarole of getting ready to take a picture, it occurred to me that I might have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had used a 35 mm camera and fine grain film. Luckily I didn’t. This would have ruined my Russian ritual.
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