Iosif Kaganovich was commonly known as Ionya in our family and in the company of his tourist friends. If someone could not pronounce this name, they called him Lyonya.

He was born in the town of Shchors, Ukraine in 1934. He lived in the City of Lvov and then in Ufa for the rest of his life until 1995.

Iosif was a precision engineering specialist. He enraptured with his skills to operate almost any machine. He designed spark treatment chamber for the manufacturing of the parts of electric shavers.

He had a hobby to hike to hard-to-reach places of the Soviet Union, to collect fine stones there, and then to make masterpieces out of them at his home shop. He made the beautiful adornments, bijous, jewel cases, or just polished one side of the stone to amaze viewers with its beauty. He had Golden Hands; everything he did, came out perfectly. The cool thing was that the product of his craft was given to somebody as a gift. I can’t remember he made any money on stones.

In the summer he sailed down the Siberian Rivers. In the winter time he skied in Soviet resorts affordable for his poor Soviet engineer income. We are cousins with a thirteen-year age difference. He was in the “elder group” of our ski company. Once somebody asked me, “Where is your cousin?” It sounded like French [ku:zen]. Everybody liked it. The pronoun ‘your’ disappeared, and the nickname Koo`zen stuck. Then almost everybody called him this way.

On next tabs you will see cousin Ionya’s pictures. He made them on the go although he could see the beauty of a flower or tree with his soul. So, as he used to say Einjoy!

Joseph made his pictures with Zenith-E, a 35-mm camera with Helios-44, a 58-mm lens. Both were Soviet domestic products. It was the best affordable Soviet mirror camera at that time. It was not TTL yet and exposition should be calculated by sight. Joseph did it perfectly. He utilized reversal slide films ORWO-Colour and ORWO-Chrome manufactured in East Germany. At that time it was the best quality color films in the country. Most photographers did not use color negative films because of its low quality and very long and expensive processing.

I scanned his photos on Plustek OpticFilm 7200i film-scanner and restored it with SilverFast SRD retouching process which removes dust and scratches incredibly. Most of his pictures were in very bad condition.

Enjoy Joseph’s pictures in his Photo Galleries below

Macro	Winter	Summer	Ski	Family