Over the Labor Day weekend I was trying to catch up on some of my personal photos and came across this image I took in May 2009 while cleaning out my junk from my mother's attic. My sister had been badgering me for a couple of years to clean sweep so I finally took a flight across the pond to do the deed. Initially I found the task quite difficult – the attic housed much of my first 30 years on this planet, including school report cards, notebooks, etc. There was no way my wife would allow me to bring that stuff back home to America so started sorting into trash, auction and take-back-to-the-US. In the pile to take-back-to-the-US was one of my old canon t90's that had seen me around a lot of south africa and Brunei; my silver, limited edition, Canon eos 10 kit (serial number 1352995, GB1223) never used, still in its plastic bag in its box, and a bunch of black-and-white prints. Into the auction pile went my collection of ‘Action man' dolls, my LP and singles collection, various other memories and my Zenit UPA 5M enlarger – the same enlarger I'd used to make all those black-and-white prints.[ad name=”post”]
My good friend, Peter Cripps, had gotten me really interested in photography while we were still at high school. Living in a smaller house, I had to be more creative about my darkroom that Peter did. My only choice was to use the only bathroom in the house so that meant going portable and that's where the Zenit UPA 5M Enlarger came into the picture (so to speak).
As you can see, the UPA 5M came broken down inside a briefcase. Assembly was simple as there were only seven pieces, eight if you include the base. There was a short rod that screwed into the main rod, the short rod locking into the tube in the outside of the case (right hand side of the lid in the photo) Pre-mounted to the rod was the light and lens carrier frame which had a pressure wheel with a knob to raise and lower the assembly for enlargements and a locking screw to fix the assembly for exposure. Onto the top of the lens assembly one pressure mounted the lower half of the light housing. You then put the bulb unit through the top of the light housing, screwed in the bulb, then twist-locked the top of the light housing to the bottom. After slotting in the negative holder and plugging in the light you were ready to go. I could get this thing set up in under two minutes and tear it down again in less.
Given the fake snakeskin covering of the attache case the unit came in and being of Russian manufacture (well Union of Soviet Socialist Republics manufacture as it was then) I always had a vision of one of John Le Carré's spies hurriedly making prints in a dingy hotel room somewhere as Smiley's people closed in on him (the BBC were dramatizing Le Carré around the same time).
Perhaps, well certainly, not the best enlarger, it was both cheap and portable. These were more significant factors for me then, 30 or so years ago, than image sharpness. That said, I only printed up to 10×8 and the sharpness was perfectly acceptable when I took the time to focus the unit properly and ensure the locking screw was tight. There are times, when I sit at my computer to process digital images that I get nostalgic for seeing the image appear on the paper, but I don't miss the chemicals nor the inconvenience of setting-up and tearing-down my temporary darkroom. And as for the slow emergence of the image, I can get the same feeling by painting on a layer mask in Photoshop.
