Description
In 2003, I accidentally bought an AGAT-18K half-frame camera made in Russia. The device is considered one of the smallest and lightest 35mm film cameras ever made. With no batteries, and no complicated operation, it’s like a plastic toy, and using a roll of 135 film the camera could take 72 pictures with 36 exposures.
In the years before smartphone photography prevailed, this camera became my most intimate friend on the way, I had been using it on some casual occasions or whenever it felt inappropriate to use a professional camera—just like how one uses a smartphone to take pictures nowadays. I used it for twenty years. The photos I took with it had no particular themes, but are more like small clues and slices in my entire creative process, and had always been a part of my experience throughout the years.
AGAT means “agate” in Russian and “elf” in Bulgarian. I could not find out the origin of the name 18k, perhaps because of the yellow control panel of the camera. 18k also refers to the purity of gold in jewellery, and another definition for 18k is the lowest rank of the Go game. The camera was manufactured by the Belarusian optical company Belorusskoe Optiko-Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie (BelOMO) from 1988 to 1997. Located in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, BelOMO is not a single enterprise but a consortium of many optics-related companies.
