gear
Tools, bought used and worked hard: a press photographer's Nikon with thirty years in its shutter, my father's Zenit from Chisinau, a recorder that exists because bad notes once erased a train conversation. I do not review things. I keep what earns its place in the bag and write down what it changed.
19 entries, newest first.
2026
A helmet over the bed
· A sitcom genie, a decade of white plastic that reached me late, and a spherical television hung from its factory chain over the brass bed.
An orange telephone
· The pacific blue phone retires at 71 percent battery. In its place, a cosmic orange I cannot entirely explain.
The watch that cannot calculate
· A twelfth birthday, a chronograph from my mother, and a bezel scale that does nothing: fourteen years of slowly changing my mind.
Four digits in the entryway
· Last Sunday at the barakholka: an industrial wall clock in a wooden frame, a classroom I had not thought about in years, and a day that is suddenly countable.
2025
The recorder
· A small black handheld with two microphone capsules, bought after bad notes erased a train conversation I needed.
My father's Zenit
· A parcel from Chisinau: the Zenit-E he once used to photograph my mother, and a catalogue card with one sentence in librarian hand.
What the bag carries
· Before a research trip, the full kit on the duvet, and the ritual of removing one third of what ambition packed.
The night the drive clicked
· An external drive clicks like a beetle, unmounts, and teaches a sticky-note rule about existing twice.
2024
Ready to Navigate
· Guesthouse night: paper maps, a barakholka survey laptop that boots like a tractor, and route-making as evening prayer.
Forty frames for one
· On the unglamorous arithmetic of a self-portrait: a sock on the floor, a cable release in the palm, and the neighbor who has theories.
The Little Box on the Hot Shoe
· A used Nikon GP-1A from a Bishkek stall, and the quiet relief of frames that finally know where they were taken.
2023
A Fifty from Nineteen-Eighty-Something
· At the Sunday barakholka, a heavy little Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 whose focus ring moves like honey under the thumb.
Both Sides of the Camera
· A Sunday of merciless focus, a sock on the floor, and learning to make my own image on my own terms.
Tripod, Remote Shutter, Tea
· A black Manfrotto tripod, a cable release, and the quiet discovery that I can stand on both sides of the camera alone.
The Camera That Outlived a Newsroom
· A used Nikon D5 from a retiring press photographer in Bishkek: scuffed corners, a golden box, and thirty years of other people's history.
2021
Kukuruznik
· A flight into Dnipro, a biplane older than my parents still earning its keep on a wet apron, and a borrowed headset that smelled of somebody else's work.
The Writing Machine
· A used 13-inch MacBook Pro from the classifieds, complete with manuals, stickers, and a cursor that blinks the old impatient way.
Curfew Light
· An evening walk inside the permitted radius, an FFP2 mask, and night mode pointed at a city holding its breath.
