The photographs made with the film large format cameras still remain popular nowadays. Herewith the story of underwater large format seems to be unrevealed. After the works of Louis Boutan, Jacob Reighard and other researchers in the late XIX – early XX centuries the use of large format cameras for underwater shooting has stopped. Since that times nobody has taken the photographs using this technique. Working on this project we had a chance to continue the story of subaquatic large format. We decided not to use the sealing of the camera, this decision gave us the opportunity to work with camera underwater as if it were on land. Also thanks to this we realized our project at most rough conditions, in the North, far from the sea, with the simple equipment.

This series of the photos is made under water using only a hand-made 18 X 24 cm film box camera. Our goal was to achieve simplicity and candor in our photos to be distinguished in their pattern, mood and technical imperfectness from the gloss of modern digital images, to explore the possibilities of old film-shooting techniques and their aesthetic qualities.

The shooting was carried out in a lake in the North-West of Siberia near the city of Surgut. The water temperature during the shooting period in 2017 ranged from 20 C in summer to 1 C in fall. Most of the shooting sessions were done at night.

For the shooting we used x-ray film 18x24 cm. Our camera is a simple sliding box with a monocular lens and no mechanical shutter. We didn’t use waterproof case or other sealing for the camera and during the sessions it was fully filled with the water. We made five film-holders, in which the film was covered by the glass. The ikelite DS 51 flash was used as the source of light.

During the shooting sessions, we had to invent, improvise, and make additional elements of gear. Gradually, we acquired two dry diving suits from military divers’ arsenal, a rebreather IDA-59M and a 50-years-old scuba. This gear helped us the create the character of our images. All immersions were done in a free diving mode.

We wanted to honor the first divers, underwater photographers who opened the door for us into this world. We conducted the project against the rules, with no expert help, safety equipment or relevant experience. However, this allowed us to go backward, to return in times when those rules were created, and to appreciate the efforts of the pioneer underwater photographers. The use of simple and old-fashioned technique in underwater photography has proved its relevance and potential. Coming back to the past we realized actually we were in the future.

The fruit of our work is a series of black-and-white photographs that evoke rather contradictory emotional associations. The use of a monocular and a pinhole, large format film, contact print, the artifacts on the images and the absence of mechanical shutter allow for artistic originality of the photographs and reveal unexpected angles of the images.

Our project fills up the possibilities of underwater photography with the simple and original technique, amplifies the artistic, aesthetic and technical variety of subaquatic shooting, allows the large format camera to take same place under the water as it has on land.