Reconstructing E-E KOZLOV's photo archive from the 1980s • Introduction • © Hannelore Fobo, 2021

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov inherited his camera, a Soviet 35 mm FED-2, from his father, a gifted amateur photographer who processed black and white film negatives and printed photographs himself more >>. According to a Russian website dedicated to cameras, it is a FED-2 of the second generation, the FED-2 IIA edition produced between 1956 and 1958, identifiable by the cable release socket near the lens. External link >>

Perhaps the most famous picture of a FED-2 is André Villers’ portrait of Pablo Picasso from 1962 with Picasso posing for him in front of a small house at Mougins. The camera is hanging from the artist’s neck, in an open leather case with shoulder straps attached to it. The Cyrillic engraving ФЭД-2 can be detected above the camera’s lens. Reproductions of Picasso’s portrait reworked by Joan Fontcuberta in 1995 appear on many internet sites (Museu Picasso, external link), and the internet community discusses the reasons for Picasso appearing with a FED-2 – and the question whether he actually used it.



André Villers’ portrait of Pablo Picasso with a FED-2 camera from 1962 re-interpreted by (E-E) Evgenij Kozov in 2021.		The FED-2 camera is hanging from Picasso's neck in an open leather case with shoulder straps attached to it. The Cyrillic engraving ФЭД-2 can be detected above the camera’s lens.

Thanks to Valentin Kozlov’s passion, there are quite many pictures dating to the artist’s early childhood. But around 1963, Valentin Kozlov seems to have lost interest in photography, perhaps because it was too complicated to convert the family’s small (and only) room in a communal flat into a darkroom, when needed. In the following years, the camera remained almost untouched, until Evgenij Kozlov discovered the possibilities of photography in the second half of 1970s. At that time, the family of three had already moved to their own small flat at Peterhof, where E-E was able to set up small photo laboratory with his father’s equipment, in the lumber-room attached to his room.

After the death of his father in 1980, Kozlov intensified his artistic activities – not only painting and drawing, but also photography. I have discussed previously (for instance in the above mentioned article “The Atlas of Ontology” more >>) how those different artistic techniques influenced each other in Kozlov’s work. “CuCsCaP (One hundred questions and answers)”, a painting from 1987 in a 171 x 354 cm format, is a particularly important example of using vintage prints for a large work more >>.

Kozlov used the FED-2 until 1990, when he continued with a Nikon N8008. With a zoom lens, an autofocus and a motor for film winding and automatic film loading, the Nikon was much faster to operate than the mechanical FED 2. As a result, the FED-2 remained untouched in the cupboard again for many years, until I decided to write its history and study its mechanism.

In fact, what interests us in the context of this article is Kozlov’s “FED-2” period, when he, like his father, processed and printed his of black and white negative films himself. I generally call this period “The Leningrad 1980s”, although, as we have seen, the decade starts a little earlier and ends a little later, lasting from approximately 1978 to 1991.

There is yet another camera in Kozlov’s box of photo items, a LOMO 135 VS from 1978. Evgenij Kozlov doesn’t remember how and when it joined his equipment – he thinks he must have received it from a friend – nor is it clear whether he used it regularly. At any rate, if he used it, then it was during the same “Leningrad 80s” period, so that with respect to his archive, we are speaking about one large collection of black and white films.

It is now impossible to state the total number of pictures Kozlov shot in those years, because many of the negatives are lost. In such cases, the images themselves may still exist on contacts sheets and other vintage prints. Obviously, this doesn't give us any information about those images or films that are completely lost. We can, however, establish the number of 35mm black and white images available on negatives and/or contact sheets (leaving aside a smaller number of colour photographs and medium format negatives).

I recently recounted them and felt quite happy when the result, 6028 pictures, confirmed what I had written first written in 2010, in my article Evgenij Kozlov’s Photographs in his art of the 1980s: approximately 6000 pictures more>>. This is not counting those completely “black” images in a film corresponding to “white” negatives, that is, negatives with no exposure to light.

So if the total number of pictures is 6028, what, then, is the total number of films? This is a rather difficult question to answer. After processing a negative film, Kozlov would cut it into strips with 5 or 6 images each (there could be less or even more). Very often, he placed strips from different films on a photo paper to print a contact sheet, and then wrapped those filmstrips in a piece of paper he attached to the contact print with a paper clip.

In this way, the original sequence of the films strips was disrupted, which made it impossible to say whether all 36 or 37 (and up to 39) pictures of a film still existed. Put differently, if we divide 6028 by 36, which is the standard number of images in a small format negative film, this is does not lead us vey far. We would only get a hypothetical minimum number of films – 167 – but not the number of films the artist actually shot, which is indeed higher.

Although this “mixing” of filmstrips on a contact sheet was the result of Kozlov’s individual approach to his photography as art rather than as documentation, it did have an unwanted effect on my study of his pictures as historical artefacts, since it became difficult to define the time and place of what these images show. In other words, it was difficult to contextualise them and to establish a chronology of those events they present. This is why I decided to restore the original filmstrip sequences – to the extent the material allowed me to do so, and, obviously, with the help of Evgenij Kozlov and other people involved in the events. To leave the original prints intact, I worked with copies. While I finished the basic work twenty years ago, each new study still adds some corrections to previous results.

The variations in the dating and numbering systems proper to Soviet Svema and Tasma negative films, which constitute the large majority of Kozlov’s films, turned out to be highly convenient to reconstruct the sequence of filmstrips. In this regard, Soviet films are much better resources than those standardised systems of western films, for instance, those Kodak films which Kozlov sometimes used in his last years of his black and white photography. Specific features of Kozlov’s FED-2 camera, especially the slightly asymmetric film transportation system, also left their traces on the negative films. All these individual features helped me to establish an archive of the “Leningrad 1980s” I have since been using for my research.

In order to explain the reconstruction of Evgenij Kozlov’s photo archive, I will first highlight some of the technical aspects of the FED-2 camera and of the LOMO 135 VS before moving on to the film material and, finally, to the archive itself and the numbering system I developed for it, keeping it as simple as possible and as elaborate as necessary.

next page: Chapter 1. The FED-2 camera

Synopsis

Introduction

Part 1. Hardware

Chapter 1. The FED-2 camera

Chapter 2. The LOMO 135 VS

Chapter 3. Soviet black and white negative films

Chapter 4. Colour photography

Chapter 5. Loading the film cartridge

Chapter 6. Svema and Tasma filmstrip edge markings

Part 2. Software

Chapter 7: (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov’s contact sheets

Chapter 8. Reassembling filmstrips to their original sequence

Chapter 9. Numbering the films

Chapter 10. Not lost, just found: pictures of a Pop Mekhanika performance

Chapter 11. Paper archive and digital archive

Chapter 12. How to bring a system to perfection

Uploaded 3 May 2021