Kamera with a K – An ode to a love of Kamera: Shooting Seoul with a long missed Zeiss Ikon ZM

I love cameras and this is a little bit of a love story.

I always have – ever since I picked up my older brothers much used Halina 35X and put a roll of Tudor – a UK same day print shop that was really 3Ms colour film – through it on a school trip to Windsor Castle.

That as about 44 years ago, around the same time I fell in love with the Rollei and Voigtlander range of 35mm SLR cameras. In particular the SL35E, sat in the window of a camera shop in Swansea. Sadly though, while saving paper-round and birthday money as fast as I could, Rollei ceased to exist and that dream “of”, moved on to a Pentax and a use that continues to this day with ME Super and MX, but over the years has included a P30, a Cosina CT1 and even a Ricoh KR10 for a while as well as the Pentax istD* all the way back in (was it really as long ago as) 2005.

Then for my 40th birthday, 18 years ago, I bought a Zeiss Ikon ZM Limited Edition, after a flirtation with a Voigtlander Bessa R2 for a couple of years.

No, they are not Rollei you shout – but they share/shared a philosophical heritage with the melange that was Zeiss/Voigtlander/Rolleiflex of the era that first made me excited about Kameras. The K is also important… Deutsche Kamerahersteller

Though that should really be ‘was’ – as my ZM was stolen in 2018 while we lived in Vietnam, along with a clutch of Voigtlander and Zeiss L39 and M glass and some other bodies, including a Rollei SL2000f – perhaps a story for another day… As of now, the ZM has yet to be replaced, as daily I have watched the price of bodies move skywards.

It’s only about the Kamera!

In someways I’m also a bit of a lazy photographic artist.

I love cameras and taking photos much more than I love showing, sorting, editing, developing, printing or even walking down the road to a lab – when that as a common possibility. Sat in the circle, I can honestly hold my hand up and announce: I am a lazy photographer.

So, over the last 20 years I have accumulated around 50 or so rolls of exposed but undeveloped film. Some film has been lab developed along the way, but much more has sat waiting. Not because I don’t have developing equipment or a scanner, but because my interest has always really laid in the camera itself.

It is really love affair with German engineering – but not always German engineering of German origin. I even own a Brazilian made VW T2c micro-bus. As an educator who teaches a philosophy-based course to 16 and 17 year olds, it’s a love affair that is very much based in a world view – my ontology of Kameras and Deutsche Kamerahersteller. See it’s there again. As a child of the wrong cusp of the 60s and the even more wrong cusp of 1979, quality photography was a K word – the black and white images of Bailey with a Rolleiflex kamera in hand, never mind his Olympus trip adverts.

This summer with a tiny bit of time set aside and armed with a 40 year old Paterson tank and some fresh Adox D-76, I started bashing through rolls of mainly HP5+ and FP4+. All of indiscriminate age, but few with a possibility of being less than 8 years old. The results were negatives which showed little evidence of “out of date” and more evidence that trying to develop when you are renovating a house in France with lime, goat’s hair and sand mortars is a dusty practice… Oh thank god for scanning and GIMP.

As the first roll came out – it just happened to be possibly the first roll I shot when we moved to Korea in 2012. Images I had totally forgotten I had taken on film. Images that reminded me of former colleagues, of how my children have grown, and of how lucky I have been to live in 11 different countries in the last two decades. A roll of film taken after about about two days in Korea when I hardly knew the place at all.

Lost love

Yet mostly each image reminded me why I loved my Zeiss… In part it’s because camera should always be spelled with a K… but more importantly the joy of wandering the streets and vistas of anywhere with a camera in hand is a very special experience. It’s a communion with experience. But it is also, sometimes, a distance from having to be part of. Yet always for me it’s about the pure fascination with mechanics and optics. The amazement that a box with a bit of glass can focus and snap open and shut at 1/1000 of a second. Its about sticking a different bit of glass on the front and the affect that has: a change perspective and of view and of all sorts. Then there is making that hole in the middle bigger or smaller and the magic it can weave.

It also reminded me that as someone who isn’t new to playing with film – remember 44 years of doing it – that my choices of arsenal were originally much more about emotion than it is ever about marketing or hype or especially social media trends. I never even considered a Canon AE-1 – by then my emotional investment in what in the 1980s were very expensive bits of technology for a teenager, was already squarely in the Zeiss/Rollei/Pentax camp – oh if only they had found a way to collaborate beyond T*, HFT and SMC. It reminded me of the contrast with today’s, next last post led, next analogue camera jump you must have. That’s not to say today’s discoverers of film are wrong, they are just different, with lots of relatively affordable classic boxes available at the simple press of a rainbow shopping bag button.

But that, as always with Kameras is only a pause.

I still have around 30 rolls of Velvia to develop and some colour negative – which will wait until November when I am back home in France, may be…possibly… with some time and who knows what. But for now I look at the bank balance with voices on each shoulder – one child in university and one heading to university – Kameras are a luxury right now – and I already have enough (don’t I) – and then I check out online listings for a Cosina made Zeiss Ikon ZM – it doesn’t even have to be the Limited Edition – because in the end for me its always about the K in camera.

Please come and visit me on Intsagram, Threads and Youtube, where after almost 50 years of making images I am starting to put my personal thoughts down.

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