Occasionally I get very fed up with my health. Especially these days it keeps acting up and it’s hard to figure out why. However, I have come to understand that with chronic stuff it sometimes doesn’t need a specific reason at all. It might just be another phase, another flare and there is not much one can do apart from sitting it out. With my last bigger flare before this one I spent my time playing computer games and reading a lot of science fiction, which wasn’t all that productive. This time I decided to learn Russian. Although I can’t shoot much these days, it actually comes at a time when there isn’t much going on anyway. It’s autumn, the streets are empty and the weather is dark and grey. So even if I were to try to shoot, I’d just get frustrated. So, to pass my time I learn Russian.
The difficult and annoying part about language learning is that initial obstacle of getting through all that vocabulary and grammar that needs to be assimilated before real content in the language can be tackled. Once the basics are there – some 5000 words and all the main parts of the grammar -, language learning becomes as easy as reading a good book or watching another TV series dubbed in that language. With Russian there are two difficulties that make this initial hurdle especially annoying: 1. The words have not much in common with any of the words I’m used to, so it takes longer to memorise them and 2. There is a lot of grammar that seems rather alien, if not even illogical. There are 6 cases for 3 genders with a ton of rules and exceptions, strange verb forms that behave like adjectives, case distinctions between direction and location as well as the strangest ways to express the simplest things, plus a bunch of other nasty things that I haven’t even learned yet in detail. I guess it will all take a little longer to learn than I had initially hoped.
This Russian learning attempt is not completely disconnected from my photography by the way. I already have a specific plan for a project for which I will definitely need to speak the language. So, oddly enough learning Russian is just as relevant for everything I talk about on this blog as film, cameras and developers are. In fact, my Russian adventure is part of the very same project that made me attempt to integrate colour into my workflow and brought me as far as developing C41 film and shooting ISO 100 E6 film. Who would have thought that letters that look like bugs (?, ?, ?, etc) would have anything at all to do with photography (beyond old soviet film cameras like the Zorki or the Kiev of course)? I’m not sure how long it will be before I can show you any results from that project, but considering all the different links in the causal chain I’m trying to disentangle, it will probably still be a while.
All pictures taken with: Leica M6, Zeiss ZM C-Biogon 35mm f/2.8
Ilford HP5+ developed in Caffenol-CH, Jobo CPE-2.
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
I think she likes him!
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
Uhm …
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
Afraid of dogs?
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
Yummy!
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
Chat on a bench.
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
Family scene.