Searching for the past
For photojournalist Hugo Passarello Luna, documenting war re-enactors with a ‘soldier’s camera’ helped in his quest for authenticity. He speaks to Amy Davies about his fascinating project
A fascinating project using re-enactors with a ‘soldier’s camera’
Take a quick glance over this feature and you’d be forgiven for not realising these photos were taken recently, not during WWI. Hugo Passarello Luna’s project, ‘Nostalgie de la boue’ (nostalgia for mud), documents war re-enactors in France. To step into this past world, Luna uses a Vest Pocket Kodak (VPK), also known as ‘the soldier’s camera’, to record the action.
Speaking to us from his home in France, Luna explains his motivations behind the project. ‘I was interested in why they do this [take part in re- enactments], why are they so into the details, why they are searching for that authenticity, even wearing the same uniforms down to the slightest detail.’
‘So I thought, what if I sort of play along – instead of photographing them with a modern camera, I used a Kodak Vest Pocket.
‘By the way, I found it to be a very quixotic quest – it’s very idealistic because it’s not the same context. Even though they’re wearing the same uniforms, using the same rifles – and the same for my photography – it’s not the same. I know I’m not going to be killed.
‘All the work we do belongs to its time, which is one of the things I am interested in – no matter how much you search for authenticity, you are always out of context and fatally in the present – you cannot go back.’
As you might imagine, using a camera that was considered cutting edge in 1914 has its own set of challenges. Sourcing the cameras is fairly easy – such was the proliferation of VPKs, they’re relatively easy to come across on sites such as eBay, but whether you find one that works as it should is another matter.
‘It’s supposed to be a simple camera,’ Luna explains, ‘ That’s why they sold it to soldiers back then. But it is an old machine; they do work, I have five of them, but they’re old cameras and they fail often.
‘Sometimes there are light leaks, so it gives me a sort of personality to the images. Sometimes the
negatives get a little scratched, and sometimes, parts fall apart. Of course, it’s a 100-year-old camera – I was using it and the viewfinder just fell on the ground. I fi xed it, but you’ve got to get used to it.’
Presuming you can find a working VPK, capturing a good shot is still tricky. ‘One of the hardest things with the camera is the framing – the viewfinder doesn’t show exactly what you’re going to get. It shows you a larger view, so I need to go back quite a lot to get the image. You also need to be around 2.5-3 metres from the subject so the right thing is in focus.
‘It’s also slow. The fastest speed that it has is 1/50sec, so you need to hold your breath to get sharp images. Sometimes it’s perfectly in focus, sometimes there’s a slight hand shake – for my project it’s OK because it ends up resembling what soldiers would have created.’
Luna says the biggest challenge is getting hold of VPK-compatible film. The camera accepts 127 film, which Kodak stopped producing in 1995, but it remains a niche format today. ‘As far as I know, the only place that makes it is a small Japanese company, based on an island in the far north of Japan, next to Russia. Their website is only in Japanese – and I couldn’t figure it out even with Google Translate. I asked a friend of mine to call them and order me a pack of 20 films. They sent me an invoice through PayPal, all in Japanese – I just clicked and hoped.’
Luna is originally from Argentina. He moved to Europe ten years ago and was drawn to this project due to the huge impact the First World War had on France and the French. ‘France witnessed some of the most gruesome battles on the Western Front – Verdun, The Somme – so it’s not just any country. England fought it, Germany fought it, but most of the battles happened here; every single town has a monument.’
The project reaches a natural conclusion with the anniversary of the armistice on 11 November 2018. Luna says that the overall aim of the work is to examine the question of memory, but he’s not entirely sure whether the re-enactors he meets on the ‘ battlefields’ will like the finished piece.
‘Sometimes we’re on the exact same battleground, on the exact same date; they re-do the battle, almost the same way as they did 100 years ago – but no matter what we do, our memory is just a recreation, and we invent it. It belongs to the present, not to the past or how the past appears.’