In December 2019, I took a quick trip to Belarus with a good friend. I had no idea it would be the last time I got on a plane for nearly two-and-a-half years.
We spent a few days in the imposing capital Minsk, striding through vast, snow-flecked boulevards. I gave a talk at a film photography collective about Kosmo Foto; every seat was full and it was the only time in my life I’ve had to sign autographs.
I’d expected blankets of snow, but the Belarusian winter was surprisingly mild. The days were mostly bright, making for plenty of opportunity to take pics in the winter sunlight.
After a few days we headed to Brest, the border city that was once Polish and was the scene of several bitter battles in World War II. In the Cold War years that followed it was an important Soviet border crossing; now it stands on the border between two different Europes.
I packed a handful of cameras for this trip, including a Zenit-E; the world’s most produced SLR. It became so popular in the 1970s that a new factory for them had to be built in Belarus, so it was a nod to this country’s camera-making past.
The Intourist is a stone’s throw from St Simeon’s, an Orthodox Christian cathedral built in the 1880s and abandoned during the Soviet years
Another was the Pentax ES II, a staple of my travelling kit and pretty much my favourite SLR. It’s one of the last cameras in Pentax’s famed Spotmatic line, featuring a steeples electronic shutter that can read the selected aperture on SMC Takumar M42 lenses. It’s an absolute joy to use and the lenses are superb.
The ES II, which was released in 1973, is very much a Cold War camera, and our hotel had a touch of Cold War vibes, too. It was the Hotel Intourist, named after the Soviet-era tourist agency that kept a watchful eye on any foreign visitors holidaying in the USSR.
When I got to my room, I opened the curtains to check the view. The Intourist is a stone’s throw from St Simeon’s, an Orthodox Christian cathedral built in the 1880s and abandoned during the Soviet years, only to be rebuilt shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Beyond lay drab apartment buildings and in the distance a belching factory smokestack.
For a moment I was reminded of this beautiful shot by the National Geographic photographer Sam Abell – pears ripening on a windowsill with Moscow’s Kremlin beyond, and a fluttering curtain in between the camera and the lens. It’s one of Abell’s most famous images, and was captured on a visit to the Soviet capital in 1983.
I had a roll of Kodak Portra 400 loaded in my ES II – this was pre-pandemic, so it was still pretty affordable – and spent a few seconds working out the composition. I pushed the see-through curtain to the side, but so that some of it was still viewable; I knew it wouldn’t have the same effect if it just looked like something I had snapped outside.
I took another version of this pic on a medium format camera – a 6×6 Iskra folding camera – from the hotel corridor, but this image the edges of the hotel room curtain in shot, has stuck with me.
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.
