my father and photography
My exposure to photography dated back to my childhood through my father.
When I was little my country was not doing as well as tody. Camera was a luxury. Few people owned it. Because of his profession my father had access to various cameras, most of them 120cm. including Leica. All manual.
When he did not work he would spend hours and hours playing with them and taking pictures of me and my brother and other people, as well as the plants in our garden. Most of them were black and white.
Sometimes he could not finish developing all the films in the darkroom. He had to bring them back home. He created his own darkroom in one of our rooms by blocking windows with layers and layers of blankets. Or simply turned the space under a bed into a darmroom. My father, me and my brother crawled under the bed. First, he took the film out of his camera inside a blanket. Then dip them under a big bowl first for a while until we saw image showing up, and then move the film to a second big bowl and soaked it for a while in the liquid. The light source was a smoke end in my father's mouth. The last step was to move the film to a third bowl filled with water. Finally we all crawled out and brought the film to rinse using the water from the well in the courtyard, streaching our bodies. To me and my brother it was like watching magic shows.
My father let us touch everything on the camera and even let us take pictures of each other. He tried hard to explain how a camera worked in a very simple way.
My father passed away when he was still young. But he sowed the seed of passion for photography in me without me knowing it until two years ago after I came to New York, where I got the chance to see some great b/w pictures. My body trembled whenever I caught sight of a good one. Since then I had been feeling stronger attraction to photography.
This summer, I started shooting pictures. The seed inside me grew up. My life suddenly has focus.
