Way back in 2018 I had a look at the Kiev 4, a rangefinder camera from the Soviet Union. From the 1930s onwards the Soviet Union made a series of copies of German rangefinder cameras, most commonly Leicas - the Fed and Zorki - but they also made a copy of the Contax II, a completely different model designed by Carl Zeiss AG.
The Contax II was a contemporary of the mid-1930s Leica III, made in the Zeiss factory in Dresden. In theory it was the better camera. It had a wider
rangefinder base, a higher top shutter speed, a clever
double-bayonet mount that supported internal focusing with standard lenses, and a supposedly tougher metal shutter.
Some photojournalists used it - Robert Capa ran up the beach on D-Day with one
- but on the whole it didn't capture the public's imagination in the same way
as the cute little Leicas.
Despite being based in Dresden the Zeiss factory survived the Second World War mostly intact, although Zeiss was split into two separate companies, one eastern, one western. It was taken over by the Soviets, who restarted production of the
pre-war Contax II in order to give people something to do. In the years that followed the Soviets moved the tooling to Kiev in Ukraine and renamed the camera, because the western Zeiss objected to their use of the Contax trademark.
The Kiev 4 remained in production more or less unchanged right up until the end of the Soviet Union. My two Kievs were made in 1975 and 1982, by which time they were an anachronism. I've walked past the factory in which they were made - it's just outside the
Arsenal tube station in Kiev. In the 2000s it was run by a company called
Arax, who refurbished Soviet-era medium format cameras. Arax still seems to be
in business but they apparently no longer own the factory.
When I was young Russian cameras were hip. This was the 1990s. Kids today
might not remember, but just before digital photography became a thing there
was a hipster fad for low-fidelity analogue photography with the likes of the
Chinese Holga and Russian Zenits and disposable cameras etc. It was a reaction
to the super-saturated perfection of Fuji Velvia, and the eye-controlled focus
and motor-everything technical flash of the Canon EOS 5 and Nikon F80.
The F80 and EOS 5 were excellent cameras, but they were expensive and bulky.
The alternative was an APS compact, but they tended to have super-slow zoom
lenses. Furthermore there was something plastic and unsatisfying about them.
Russian cameras on the other hand were a cheap way of getting hold of fast lenses, or experimenting with
medium format, or trying out an actual old-fashioned rangefinder. Rangefinder cameras died off in the 1960s and 1970s as a mainstream concern, displaced by SLRs and autofocus compacts, but there's something appealing about making a little square split-image come into focus.
On a pragmatic level I was wary of Russian rangefinders. They were bigger than
an Olympus XA or Mju/Stylus, and the interchangeable lens mount didn't make a
lot of sense if you only had one lens. In the 1930s Leicas and Contaxes were small, handy cameras with fast lenses, but there were smaller and more practical options in the 1990s. Thus I was twenty years late to the Russian rangefinder party.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I take many more photos
than I post, and after going through my stash of Kiev 4 photos I decided
to compile a bunch that I haven't published. They were all taken with two
lenses - the standard Jupiter-8 50mm f/2, and the 35mm f/2.8 Jupiter 12,
which is surprisingly good. Which is one of the reasons why I rarely use my Kiev 4. It's just too good.
I mean, there are other reasons. You have to cut off part of the film
leader in order for it to fit on the take-up spool, and when you change
rolls you have to remove the whole camera back. And I can't trust the
accuracy of the rangefinder, although with the 35mm lens stopped down to f/5.6 it doesn't really matter as long as everything is more than fifteen feet away.
But the best hipster cameras became
fashionable because there was something optically interesting about them.
Heavy vignetting, light leaks, distortion etc. The Kiev 4 on the other hand
isn't like that. Neither of my Kievs leak light, and the lenses are
optically sound, so ultimately it's much too good to be a weird old curiosity, but because the underlying design is ninety years old it's no longer state-of-the-art.
Which is frustrating because, as mentioned up the page, the 35mm f/2.8 is pretty good. As a result I often pull out my Kiev 4, look at it, dust it off, then ask myself if I want to take it with me or not, and I feel guilty when I don't, because what did it do to me, except bring me fleeting joy? What more is there in this world?
