Pentax Spotmatic SP, Tokyo 1960s — New York 2025
Petra with the Pentax, as if film never left.
When vinyl was real, Paris was gray in films, and Tarkovsky was filming Solaris, my baby was born—sometime in the early 1970s.
A Pentax Spotmatic SP with a Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 55mm f/1.8 lens, built during the golden age of Japanese mechanical cameras. The model itself was born in the 1960s—engineered by Asahi Optical Co. in Tokyo, a company that quietly changed photography forever. No screens, no buttons, no algorithms—just a shutter, soft clicks, and light winding through glass.
The camera arrived from Japan, carefully wrapped—not just in bubble wrap or foam, but in real Japanese newspapers, as if it had paused mid-conversation and was still carrying the breath of Tokyo across the ocean. Pages filled with advertisements, kanji, small notes of the everyday. A kind of printed time capsule.
Japanese newspapers, arriving like a quiet letter from home.
Maybe someone once photographed the narrow alleys of Tokyo with it, captured lovers at the station, smoke curling in a jazz bar, or a child’s birthday somewhere in the suburbs. I’ll never know. What I do know is: it’s here now, and it’s mine.
It’s not my first film camera. That one was given to me by my mother—sometime in the late 1980s, in Moscow. I was seven. She handed me a simple Soviet point-and-shoot, probably a Zenit, the kind that was solid, square, and indifferent to you but always worked. I remember the coldness of the metal, the sound of the shutter, the way it made me feel like I could observe the world quietly, without anyone asking why.
Petra, age seven, holding her first film camera
I’ve held many cameras since. Digital, cinematic, borrowed, beloved. But this is the first film camera I’ve chosen as an adult. And that matters.
And when I held it for the first time, it felt just right. The shape, the weight, the sound—everything exactly as I remembered. So straightforward, so tactile. Even my children were enchanted. Petra, seven, held it like a secret she already knew. But the surprise was Alex. He’s only three, yet his small fingers found the shutter and gently pressed it, pretending to take a picture. No fear, no hesitation. Just joy.
Left to right:
Mr. Ryohei Suzuki (Chief Lens Designer),
Mr. Nobuyuki Yoshida (Chief Camera Designer)
These cameras—hand-assembled in Japan—weren’t just tools, they were works of precision. The Takumar lenses were so sharp and luminous they made even ordinary light look poetic. The engineers had names: Ryohei Suzuki (chief lens designer) and Nobuyuki Yoshida (chief camera designer). Men who likely never imagined that decades later, one of their machines would end up in the hands of a woman born behind the Iron Curtain, now living in New York.
So here we are. A camera born in Tokyo, a girl born in Moscow, meeting again in New York—2025. I’m holding it now. I listen to the click. I look through the viewfinder. There’s no screen. No histogram. Just light and time, passing through a piece of glass shaped more than 50 years ago.
