Film Cameras: A brief history, and stellar images created with it

FED 3 Type A | 1961-1963
The compact German rangefinder camera Leica had made its way to the Soviet Union by 1927 and had begun to change the habits of Soviet photographers before its import was halted. Feeling a need for the new camera, but not wanting to import it, the Russians took the only other alternative—they would make their own ‘Soviet Leica’. By the early 1930s, hundreds of Russian children had been orphaned by the Civil War, and were put to work in small workshops manufacturing portable electric hand-drills. Their small and nimble fingers were ideal for the camera’s assembly. Called the FED—after the FE Dzerzhinsky Labour Commune in Ukraine, where the children worked—the rangefinder camera was mass-produced from 1934 until around 1996.