Ode to the slide

I was captivated by the magic of the slide when I was five years old, in 1957. My grandfather built a little house for children in the yard, where we played during the day, and in the evenings, he would bring a filmoscope and show filmstrips. It was a thrilling spectacle!

Now I realize the quality of the filmstrips was terrible, the screen was just a white cloth, and the filmoscope was primitive, but we never noticed.

I saw my first real slides ten years later, in 1967, and they were Kodachrome slides, unmatched in quality even today!

At that time, Bratsk was very popular—a grand construction project, a young city in the taiga, and so on. Many famous people and correspondents from international publications visited the city back then. My father showed the city to correspondents and the photographer from Look magazine, one of the leading American magazines of that era. They promised to send the magazine and photos, and they kept their word! I never saw the magazine, but I remembered the slides; in fact, I still have one, although it’s damaged by poor storage. It shows my father with two correspondents somewhere on an island in the middle of the Angara River. One of the correspondents holds a huge bouquet of wildflowers, which can hardly be found now.

Later, in 1970, good reversal films from East Germany—ORWOCHROM UT18, UT16 and UK17—began to be sold in the USSR. A slide photography boom began for us, as it was the only way to capture that era in color with any quality. Everything produced in the USSR was of terrible quality. We developed the film ourselves using Hungarian DIACHROM kits. I still have hundreds of ORWOCHROM slides, beautifully preserved from those distant times.The truth is that some of the slides were hopelessly ruined due to the primitive projectors of the early 1970s…

Now, I also have a great PRADOVIT slide projector, and the magic of the projected image still captivates me. Shooting on slides today is an expensive hobby; a roll of KODAK EKTACHROME E 200 now costs €29… Yet, I hold a timid hope that the film photography boom will lead to the revival of KODACHROME film!