Exakta Varex VX

After being liberated from Dachau concentration camp and recovering in hospital in Germany, my father Elly Gotz was reunited with his surviving extended family and they were taken in as refugees by Norway. He learned Norwegian and attended night school while working as a mechanic during the day. He was still a teenager.

My father and his parents then moved to Southern Africa. My grandfather had a brother and an uncle there who were willing to help so that my father could attend university. My father had nine months to learn English and pass his high school examinations in order to begin university.

When he'd graduated as an electrical engineer he was offered a scholarship to study in England for two years. This was a great moment for him, but there were obstacles which prevented him from going. He was a stateless immigrant in a British colony, and the scholarship required he be a British subject. Before he even knew about that obstacle, my father had made the decision that he couldn't leave his parents, who were struggling financially. Instead my father built a bicycle shop, Exhibition Cycle, so that his father could quit debilitating factory work.

My grandfather wasn't cut out for retail, and the shop didn't provide enough income, so my father did other things. He created a sound recording company. He also very successfully imported, sold and repaired radios. The most interesting part of his career at that time was something quite different. My father became a one-man advertising agency.

Dad bought the Exacta camera to make advertising slides. Later, he bought a Bolex movie camera to make motion picture commercials. He outfitted a van with a slide projector and loudspeaker. He hired an entertainer who spoke four African languages and together they would go into areas that had no electricity and provide nightly entertainment shows.

The announcer told jokes and stories. They played the latest releases from Decca records and showed advertising slides with the entertainer's voicover. Dad was known as Mr. Exhibition Cycleworks, and his shows became famous. His audience grew to about 3000 people each night.

My father left that business behind to move to another city, and there have been many innovative projects and stories since then. He will be 80 in two months, and he continues to try new projects and develop new ideas.

Dad continued to use this camera throughout my childhood. He took it on camping trips, and he and my brother would spend a lot of time with it. He built a special device - a kind of tripod for macro photography. At that time, it was all about technical details, and my brother shares my father's aptitudes. I was not a part of that process. But I do remember my father sitting with me at the kitchen table with me, explaining aperture and depth of field with small drawings.

My father has great depth of field - he's interested in a broad range of things and ideas shown in bright light - the large landscape. In contrast, I think I'm more like f1.4 - I need only a little light, grasping an instant - one thing emerging sharply out of a resonant blur of background and falling back into darkness.

Julia Gotz