A KGB spy camera designed to look like a humble Zenit camera case is one of the lots on offer at this month’s Leitz Photographica auction in Austria.
The F-21 camera is hidden in a Zenit-E camera case and takes images through a masked window in the buckle of the strap, with the shutter button hidden in the base of the case.
The camera, described as being in good working condition, has a starting price of €1,000 and is expected to sell for between €2,000 and €2,400.
However, another example of the camera sold for £4,100 when it went on sale at an auction in the UK in 2018.
Kosmo Foto profiled the curious KGB camera in 2020. While the F-21 was made in reasonable quantities, the case-concealed versions are relatively rare. Noted Soviet camera collector Vladislav Kern said he had only ever seen one copy of the camera in the flesh, at the now closed KGB Espionage Museum in New York.
Also known as the Ajax-12, the F-21 was made by Krasnagorsk Mechaniskiy Zavod (KMZ) near Moscow – the same camera maker that made millions of Zenit SLRs. The F-21 was first produced in the 1950s and remained in production until 1995.
The camera will go on sale in Vienna, Austria on 23 November.
It is one of a number of rare Soviet cameras being sold at the auction, including a Salyut medium format camera used in the Soviet space programme.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
