Walking through meadows
with a fifty-year-old camera lens.
The sky here in the UK has been heavy and leaden for the last couple of weeks, with a scattering of rain and a cool wind. But the weekend gifted us with a parting of the clouds for long enough to walk in the meadows a stone’s throw from my mum’s house in Essex.
The temperature was wonderfully walkable, a far cry from the miserable extremes currently being experienced in India and the southern US. Most of the discourse in Britain has been dominated by “when is summer coming?” and “why is it so grey?” but given the choice between a few clouds and a 52°C heatwave I’ll take the clouds any day.
The ox-eye daisies were out in full bloom, great swathes of white and yellow like snowfall beneath a sunset.
Oceans of butterups swayed gently, warm and golden in the shifting light that pierced the clouds.
My camera lens of choice was the Helios-44 2, a legendary vintage lens I picked up on eBay for next to nothing. It was widely manufactured throughout the Soviet Union in the 70s and the made in USSR stamp makes me wonder what kind of images the lens has seen in the fifty years preceding my wildflower walk.
What countries has it witnessed transform from oppressed Soviet satellites to cosmopolitan European tourist destinations?
What landscapes has it witnessed transform from biodiverse forests and grasslands to concrete urban sprawls and multi-lane highways?
Fifty years, rising and falling through the glass, passing without judgement, without commentary. Just observation.
A lens, produced at the height of the Cold War with all its anxieties and fears for the future, now photographing a simple bumblebee on the foxgloves in my childhood home, its Soviet creators long gone but against a different backdrop of anxieties and fears for the future.
Fifty years from now the world will be an entirely different place. And I won’t own this lens. I’m simply its current custodian. I like to think that in half a century it will still be photographing, still be observing, as calmly and reliably then as it does now as it did in 1974.
Whether it will do so against a similar backdrop of anxiety or in a more peaceful world remains to be seen. But I can’t control that.
All I can do is look after this lens, and photograph, and walk through the meadows on a gentle day in June.
This was so moving and so peaceful at the same time. Love the way you personified the camera and such beautiful photographs 👏🏼
Lovely photos. The wildflowers seem to be doing very well this year, despite the lack of summery weather.