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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s >> ART>>
Reconstructing E-E KOZLOV's photo archive from the 1980s
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Chapter 7: (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov’s contact sheets Quite often, Evgenij Kozlov would produce contact prints before printing a particular picture. He chose photo paper of an 18 x 24 cm format, which is large enough for five strips with six pictures each – thirty pictures in total, that is, a fraction of a complete film. Many contact sheets actually display less than thirty pictures; there may be just three strips with four of five pictures each, or even less. The length of a particular filmstrip obviously depends on how Kozlov would cut a film after processing it.
Selecting the strips for a contact sheet, the artist followed his own criteria of what suited him best to continue working with the pictures. If a film documented both a “Peterhof” and a “Leningrad” event, he normally separated the strips and printed only the Leningrad part, as he did with a 6 Tasma film (AC) from 1984, which has a sequence with the Kino band (see previous page, Chapter 6, more>>) followed by a barbecue with friends. Or, if two films were taken at a concert, he might print them on three vintage prints in any order, and in case there was still some space available, complete them with strips from some other films. As a result, filmstrips on vintage prints could be from a single film, but more often than not, they were from two or three different films, and sometimes more. To keep the filmstrips connected to the respective contact sheet, Kozlov wrapped them in a piece of paper, occasionally adding a note to it, and attached them to the contact sheet with a paper clip. Some of the papers and contact sheets carry identifiers relating them to each other, a system consisting of two letters. Keeping those “sets” in a box, he could easily check the contact sheets if he wished to work with a negative.
While this was a highly efficient system for the artist himself, it turned out to be an inefficient system for me when I thought about using the pictures as a historical archive of people and events. Even in the best of cases – a contact sheet assembling thirty frames all relating to a single film – it wasn’t clear what had happened to those remaining eight or nine shots, whether or not they existed on some other contact sheet. On top of that, there were quite many filmstrips or even single negatives without any contact sheets, mostly cut and assembled with others and wrapped in paper like those from the vintage prints, while other filmstrips were uncut and kept in little boxes. On the other hand, there were also contact sheets without any films attached to them, which probably meant that the negatives were lost. To make all pictures available for my research, there was no way to get around reassembling the filmstrips according to their original order. But how could that be done without destroying the specific archive the artist had created himself? I had to create two archives – Kozlov’s original archive of vintage contact sheets and my new archive of reconstructed films that were to come as close as possible to the original film sequences. Creating for each archive its own numbering system would allow me to establish cross-references. In this way, I would be able to work with the reconstructed films without interfering with Kozlov’s original printing order. As I was trying to find out whether there existed an international standard for such a double numbering system, I searched for examples in other archives, but came to the conclusion that inventory numbers are tailor-made for each collection. The best would be to create a system that would serve my purposes, keeping it both unambiguous and convenient. I decided to have all filmstrips reprinted on contact sheets in just the same way Kozlov’s vintage contact sheets displayed them. In this way, I would be able to work with the new material instead of the vintage material, write onto it, etc. Furthermore, I needed contact sheets of all unprinted filmstrips to understand what they actually showed. Luckily, this was done twenty years ago, when printing black and white negatives in a darkroom was still fairly common among professional photographers. Friends of mine had their own laboratory at home, and we printed on Agfa paper in a 25.2 x 20 cm format, which is slightly larger than the paper Evgenij Kozlov had used. It allowed us to separate the filmstrips from each other when printing them. We inserted them into transparent film pockets according to their original order – Kozlov's order – and placed them on the photo paper in this way. I created a mask consisting of small stripes we placed on the spaces between the filmstrips. In the contact sheets, they appear as white spaces which I used these to write down the frame numbers with a felt pen, so that they could be seen at a glance.
Some of the filmstrips had extremely dark or extremely light images. In this case, we produced two contact sheets with different exposures to make sure that we wouldn’t miss any details of the images. Because the material was so huge, we had to determine where to start and how to proceed, and it seemed obvious to concentrate on events related to Leningrad’s art and music scene. As I was getting more familiar with the pictures, I was able to group them by subject – at least approximately. There are, for instance, private and public shootings with the Kino band, Pop Mekhanika performances, and New Artists performances and exhibitions. Furthermore, films documenting the creation of Kozlov’s own works were important for my research. Dates printed on the Svema and Tasma films helped to establish some kind of chronological order. The next step was to number the contact sheets and the filmstrips they display. It seemed to me that it was best to start with an identifier that would be the same for all contact sheets from Kozlov’s black and white negative archive, including the only colour negative film. Because I had given the number “1” to Valentin Kozlov’s contact sheets (we printed them at the same time), I decided for “3” as starting number for Evgenij Kozlov’s archive. (I think I planned to assign “2” to the photo archive of a friend of Kozlov’s which is also in our possession.) Since I estimated that the total number of new contact sheets would be over 100, but not exceed 999, I continued with three digits: 001, 002 etc. Accordingly, the first contact sheet is numbered 3001, the second 3002 and so forth. The next (fifth) digit relates to a particular filmstrip from a particular contact sheet: 30011 is the first (top) filmstrip of contact sheet 3001, 30012 the second, and so on.
Since no contact sheet has more than 9 strips, those five digits create an unambiguous numbering system. I wrote the number on the new contact sheets, the negative pockets, the paper wrappings, and on the vintage contact sheets, where they appear on the reverse to protect the integrity of the originals. Vintage contact sheets, new contact sheets, and negatives are kept in five A4 folders, each set of material in a separate pocket carrying the respective contact sheet number. The same goes for “orphan” vintage contact sheets with no filmstrips attached; they all have their own pockets. The old wrappings from the negatives – pieces of paper or cardboard boxes – also went into these pockets. The total number of those pages is (so far) 238, thus, the highest number is 3238. Folders 1, 2 and 3 (numbers 3001 to 3120) contain pictures related (in the first place) to Leningrad events and encounters, while folders 4 and 5 (numbers 3121 to 3238) contain those related to Peterhof events (friends and family), although there are numerous exceptions. Because Evgenij Kozlov worked with those “Peterhof” pictures less often, many films from folders 4 and 5 are still complete. Put differently, those Peterhof filmstrips the artist worked with are more likely to be in one of the first three folders.
We actually printed the vintage prints from folders 4 and 5 later, and I started reconstructing the archive with folders 1, 2, and 3. In a way, it was a work in process.
© Hannelore Fobo / text / pictures / lay-out © (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov / artwork Uploaded 3 May 2021 |
home // E-E // biographie // art // eros // Leningrad 80s // Valentin Kozlov // 2 x 3m // events // sitemap // kontakt /
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