A walk with a Soviet gem

A long time ago I owned a Leica IIIa. It was my first foray in to rangefinders and my first Leica, and it’s always had a special place in my heart. I’ve also always attributed some kind of misplaced magical quality to it. As part of this tendency I decided to replace it after selling it with a minty clean Zorki 1. If you’re a regular reader you’ll have heard this message before.

So as part of the idealization of this camera I tend to ever-so-often have the urge to, you know, ritualistically reenact the supposed magic of shooting my Leica III through the Zorki. Of course I know rationally that there’s nothing special about the Zorki or the Leica, and that the transformative effect that the Leica had on me so many years ago isn't something I can really just reenact by shooting the same camera again. It’s not the camera.

I’m always reminded of this fact when I go out and shoot it and have a lukewarm experience. It becomes quickly obvious that I’ve romanticized the whole platform. The camera is clunky, the viewfinder is tiny. The results out of the Industar are generally super low contrast and need a lot of post-processing to get them to look nice. The form factor of the Zorki can be conducive to the kind of shooting experience that I found so impactful in the earliest days of shooting the Leica. And for me at one point in my life it clearly was effective in producing a kind of shooting experience that was conducive to shooting freely and in the flow of experience, etc.. But, again, it’s not just the tool that does that. It might be precipitated by a certain tool in a certain context but that doesn’t mean the causal relationship is primarily driven by the tool.

Regardless, walking around with the little Zorki is always fun even if it’s not magic and can’t magically transport me to this creative space that felt magical in some of the earliest days of my photographic journey. I think I’ve hit a point in my life where the tool I’m using doesn’t really matter. I tend to make the same kind of photos no matter what camera/lens combination is in my hands. And that in way is its own important realization, so maybe the ritualized procedure of shooting the Zorki is still good for something even if it’s not magical teleportation to a magical mode of creativity. For photo specs here: The photographs were all shot on Kentmere 400 developed in a 1:50 mix of Rodinal.