ZORKI 4 K

On a night in Zagreb, Croatia during my Balkans road trip, I happened upon a bistro which used to be owned by a prominent (Yugoslavian) photographer Josip Klarica. Although born in Belgrade (currently Serbia) in 1946, he worked and lived in Zagreb.

Although Josip Klarica died in 2020, the bistro still displays a number of his photos as well as other Croatian photos taken by local photographers, many of them on the coast and featuring sailing boats, coastal scenes etc.

Indeed, not only featuring lovely local scenes, the bistro contains hundreds (literally!) of old (film / analogue) cameras in cabinets, on shelves and windowsills. Basically every flat surface you can find has a camera on it!

One caught my eye.

A Zorki 4K

Not only made in Russia, the Z4 and the Z4K were the first of the Zorki cameras to be exported in large numbers to Europe. Being a rangefinder camera, it probably liked to compete with Leica. And we all know the prices that Leica attract these days…

My father introduced me to Praktica cameras back in my teenage days, made, at the time, in Dresden (Eastern) Germany, before German re-unification in 1990. Although not a Zorki, Praktica comes from a similar stable and the precision engineering that went with the mass production of 35mm cameras in the Eastern bloc post WW2. Leica of course comes from Wetzlar, Hesse in (Western) Germany, just north of Frankfurt.

And maybe there lies the diveregence in camera outcomes.

Leica became a premium global brand.

Zorki's manufacturers, the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Factory, has been taken over multiple times and and is just a name in a Russian owned conglomerate, with a registered address in Yekaterinburg (the scene of the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family just after the Russian revolution 1917).

The history of cameras...

Oh - yes! The bistro has amazing food and local Croatian wine…!