Scraps of Moscow: Fotos

Showing posts with label Fotos. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Fotos. Show all posts

Monday, July 14, 2008

Friendship of Peoples

RIA Novosti caption: The USA and the USSR youth
XIII meeting in Kishinev participants. Sept. 1, 1984.
[image source]

I found this picture in RIA Novosti's online archive. It reminded me that nine years ago this year I went to Chisinau for a summer that changed my life. When I went there in 1999, of course I knew I wasn't the first American student to spend time there (though it sometimes felt that way), but I didn't realize I'd had predecessors in the 1980s.

Interestingly, on the date this picture was taken, I was taking part in my own US-USSR "youth meeting" in Leningrad - it was the first day of what would be three years of school for me at School No. 232.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Looking back on Russia Day, a month later

The Washington Post's report, illustrated by my photo of the ice bear, followed by some personal observations:

At Russian Embassy, Vodka & Good Wishes Flow
By Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts
Thursday, June 12, 2008; Page C3

What this town needs is more vodka at noon. To celebrate Russia Day, the embassy invited 2,000 friends yesterday afternoon for vodka, music, caviar . . . and did we mention vodka?

Of course, we couldn't refuse. After almost 10 years in Washington, Ambassador Yuri Ushakov was tapped last week to become Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's deputy chief of staff -- a big deal, since Ushakov will oversee foreign-policy and economic issues. He heads back to Moscow on Saturday, so the reception turned into an impromptu farewell party.

Vodka at lunch? "We're celebrating," Ushakov told us. "Why not? It's permitted."
Well, sure! Technically, we were on Russian soil. There was a giant ice sculpture of a bear holding big (actual) bottles of booze, a band playing Russian folk songs, and generals mingling with diplomats and policy wonks. Waiters lined up with trays filled with shots; bartenders poured three different brands of vodka (each with subtle differences -- it was our duty to check) plus various alcohol-based concoctions. The only thing keeping people standing were vast buffets groaning with food.

Shortly after 2 p.m., guests were gently herded toward the door, where staffers passed out cute little vodka mini-bottles. One woman nodded to her companion approvingly: "Vas goot function."

It was indeed a good function - not to mention a great promo for the vodka purveyors - a fun way to spend the early afternoon and celebrate Russia here in the US at a time when there aren't quite enough good vibes in the bilateral relationship. I wish I'd photographed them better, but here are a couple of interesting bulletin boards that the Embassy had up to illustrate highlights of modern Russian politics and of the US-Russian/Soviet relationship over the years:

This was what one would expect - displays of superpower parity and cooperation: Yalta, Ike/Nixon/Khrushchev, Bush 41 and Gorby, Bush 43 and Putin, Clinton and Yeltsin (less prominently, of course), astronauts, military/athletic/scientific cooperation, etc. But also, perhaps less expectedly, Angela Davis.

And the Embassy's portrayal of Russia's leadership - presumably, this is part of what we were celebrating:

Some Putin, but more Medvedev, with the latter's showily pious wife also prominently featured (perhaps the idea is to appeal to Americans' presumed religiosity, or perhaps just to illustrate Russia's Orthodox "renaissance"). Many if not most of these photos look like they were from Medvedev's inauguration ceremony.

Embassy staff gave guests a colorful greeting and send-off:

And finally, here is what we all should have been celebrating, since it's shared economic interests which can hopefully pull the US-Russian relationship through various political storms:

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Remembering Piter

I've added a few photos to my St. Petersburg photoset; this one is my favorite:

CIMG6265, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Platon's plaudit for Putin portrait

The head shot of Vladimir Putin looking ice-cold that graced the cover of Time's "Man of the Year" issue last year - not to mention the photo inside that had Putin looking like a cross between a tsar' and a godfather - caused quite a stir (earlier SoM posts about the issue are here and here) and had many people wondering how the photographer was able to get such shots of the Russian president. Now that photog, who goes by the name Platon, has won a World Press Photo award for the picture. As it turns out, there is indeed a fairly interesting story surrounding the photo.

You can listen to an interview with Platon in which he tells the tale of how he got the shot on the World Press Photo award website (click on 2008 and then the thumbnail of VVP) - the tale has been noted by at least a couple of photography-focused blogs as worth a listen, and I second that impression. I haven't seen a transcript anywhere, or I'd paste in some of the more interesting bits, but again, the whole thing is worth listening to.

Sofia Kornienko of Radio Svoboda interviewed Platon (as well as Stanley Green, who is famous as a photo-chronicler of Chechnya) and also got some fairly interesting comments about the Putin photo. Her own comments about the impact of the Putin "Man of the Year" issue are also quite interesting, although some of her conclusions strike me as perhaps a bit exaggerated. I decided to translate a portion of the interview (n.b. presumably an original English-language text of this interview exists somewhere, but I couldn't find it online; there are likely to be substantial differences between the original and my somewhat stilted re-translation back into English - as always here at Scraps of Moscow, you get what you pay for):

Platon: [the first part of the interview tracks closely with the story told by Platon in the audio interview linked above - Kornienko identifies Platon as a "fan of tall tales"] Then Putin came into the room, and I think he felt sorry for me. I was all sweaty and about to lose it. Pity is the only reason he agreed to pose for me. The ability to make people feel sorry for you is the photographer's greatest weapon.
The first thing I said to him was, "Let's not stand on ceremony. What was it like to meet Paul McCartney?" Everyone in the room was shocked, because in Putin's office you're supposed to stay very serious, and no one smiles. Then, when we had finished the photo shoot and were talking about the Beatles, I thought I was able to get inside his interior world.
The picture I took was a play on the Godfather, or Scarface, or something like that. I think Putin liked that picture. After all, it's what he wants, it's his style to look like a gangster.
Sofia Kornienko: After the awards ceremony, I asked Platon why he decided to take on this assignment.
Platon: It's my job. I have very strong political views, but my job is to take people's pictures, therefore part of my work is to break down the natural barrier, the natural resistance [of the subject] upon meeting them, whether it is simple shyness, emotion or a lack of confidence, to break down that barrier and reach the internal content of their personality.
In this case, I had just eight minutes to feel out that connection with what the person had inside. Having felt out the person's internal substance, I have to capture it as I see it. As far as political views, it's not my role to come up with an angle or approach to the subject ahead of time that would intentionally depict him as an evil man, if I perhaps think that's what he is. My agreement to photograph someone [also] doesn't mean that I have agreed to idolize him or sing his praises. I simply documented his presence for history.
Sofia Kornienko: But the issue of Time which named Putin "Man of the Year," on the cover of which your photograph appeared, as well as the interview illustrated by your portrait, was perceived by many liberally oriented people in Russia and outside of Russia as a betrayal on the part of our Western colleagues whose support is so highly valued. Putin's interview with Time didn't contain a single question which could have provoked a substantive discussion and, in the eyes of many, discredited the Western ideals of the free press which have generally been considered the benchmark [for journalists everywhere].
Doesn't it seem that your photograph was used as a banner or symbol of this tendency which disappointed so many readers, and what would you like to say to people who found that issue of the magazine outrageous or insulting?
Platon: The fact of the matter is that, as I already said, it's my job to document people living today. If I had lived in the 1940s, it's quite possible that I would have photographed Stalin. That doesn't mean that I support the subjects of my photos. The main thing is to get a portrait that shows who my subject really is. I can't control what happens with the portrait after that.
As soon as a photo is published, it leaves my sphere of influence and becomes public property. I am sure that one way or another history brings the truth to the surface. It's possible that some people were outraged by that issue of Time or by the context in which [Putin] was presented - I can't change that. But I documented him. I showed that if you look deep into his eyes, you see power, strength, incredible self-discipline and cold, icy cold.
I have my own strength: a visual image is able to convey to the audience that which the written word cannot. Perhaps people felt that their ideals were betrayed by the written words, but as far as the photograph, it shows Putin as he really is. That's the way he is. And one can't not accept a precise portrait, because it is true to life and honest. I tried to be honest with myself and with Putin when I was working. That's all you can expect from a photographer.

Radio Svoboda interview via

Friday, May 23, 2008

Scraps of Moscow

A few recently uploaded photos from my set of Moscow photos on flickr. These were all taken between March and June, 2005. Sometimes I really miss being there.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Graf that knocks you out!

I have uploaded a set of hundreds of photos of stickers, graffiti and other things one might call "street art" from Moscow. A few of them are already online here, and frighteningly this is still just a portion of the photos I have on my hard drive, but this is something of an effort to clear the backlog of photos I've long wanted to post from our years in Moscow. Dates are stamped on the photos by Flickr, most of these are probably from late 2004-2005. Locations are roughly in the area between Belorusskaya and Pushkinskaya along Tverskaya, except the last one, which was (if I recall correctly) on the wall of the Main Post Office building at Chistye Prudy.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Victory Day Three Years Ago

Hard to believe it has been three years since Moscow marked the 60th anniversary of the victory in WWII with a parade of military equipment from wartime days. Somehow that seemed like a much more endearing and appropriate approach to the celebration than the display of modern military might that is planned for this year.

In 2005, I was out of town on Victory Day (following the authorities' recommendations!) and missed the parade, but I got some pictures (though not very good ones) of the preparations for the parade a couple of weeks before, on April 25, 2005:

The full photoset from the practice parade is here. The same set has some pictures of Victory Day posters and decorations (also all from 2005):

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

From the TASS photobank

Creation Date: 2001/10/15

Title Rus: Резервисты, мобилизованные в абхазскую армию, едут на боевую позицию, где идет бой с бандой Руслана Гелаева.

Title ENG: Reservist soldiers are called up to Abkhaz Army to take part in action against Ruslan Gelayev's gang.

Caption: TAS25: ABKHAZIA. OCTOBER 15. A car transports reservist soldiers to combat positions at the bottom of mountain Sakharnaya Golova (Sugar Head). The reservists were called up to Abkhaz Army to take part in action against Ruslan Gelayev's gang, which penetrated to Abkhazia from Chechnya. (Photo ITAR-TASS / Viktor Klyushkin)

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Good read

LJ blogger drugoi titled his post with this photo "V for Vendetta,"
although the content of the post was laconic - "Putin in Bucharest."

A photographer who is spare with his words, drugoi is one of my favorite Russian bloggers. And I'm not the only one. The post with this photo has 153 comments, and I'm surprised it's so few - often his posts of photos with political (or politicized) subjects collect hundreds of comments.

I really enjoyed today's Moscow Times column (re-run by Russia Profile, where it will be viewable longer) by Alexander Golts (his Ezhednevny Zhurnal columns are here). Although it's brutal, I found it to be articulately brutal, if such a thing is possible, and dead-on in many respects. And it rather strangely fails to mention Georgia or Ukraine - critics of Golts's view will say this proves his one-sidedness (they'll also point out that he spent a year at Stanford, which no doubt entitles him to a lifetime of being assumed to be a US agent), but there are arguments he could have made (NATO already borders Russia; those two countries aren't going to actually be members anytime soon; etc.), and it's too bad he didn't bother.

He does, I think, a good job of describing a scenario which takes place around the world in countries other than Russia - a US "threat" is ginned up to mobilize popular support for a leader who is actually concerned about other matters entirely:

Moscow Times
April 8, 2008
West's Criticism, Not NATO, Worries Putin
By Alexander Golts

Imagine that a person decides to pose as a 19th-century Russian nobleman. He wears a long coat, walks with a cane and lets his sideburns grow long. He would suffer no serious consequences from his behavior other than the occasional shake of the head by passers-by. But now imagine that this would-be nobleman challenges others to duels at the slightest provocation and claims that the passers-by are his former serfs. At best, people would try to avoid him. At worst, they would beat him.

Something like this happened to President Vladimir Putin at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, last week.

At a security conference in Munich last year, Putin caused a scandal by suggesting that he looked at world events through Cold War eyes. He not only demanded nuclear parity with the United States but asserted that the placement of 10 U.S. missiles in Poland threatened Russia's 3,500 nuclear warheads. He further declared that NATO's eastward expansion represented a military threat to Russia.

Actually, Putin was far from being worried about a military threat from the West. At the time, he was deeply anxious about whether the West would accept the legitimacy of his plan to hand the presidency to his chosen successor. During that politically difficult period, Putin tried to engage his Western counterparts in a squabble about missiles, as world leaders did back in the 1980s.

Now that this critical period has passed, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates lavished compliments on President-elect Dmitry Medvedev after meeting him last month, and Putin has noticeably toned down his rhetoric. [...]

[Image Source]

It isn't a NATO military threat that is galling the Kremlin. Moscow is angry that no matter how polite Western officials try to be, they still believe that the democracy of Putin's government is not on a par with their own. The West considers Ukraine to be a democracy, but not Russia. In a news conference at which he tried to refute the argument that an expansion of NATO was the equivalent to an expansion of democracy, Putin said, "If this or that country is a NATO member, it claims to be a democracy. But if a country is not [a member of NATO] -- that means it is not a democracy? What kind of drivel is that?"

It is true that from Putin's point of view it must be either drivel or an outright falsehood for a country's candidacy to join a military alliance to be based on the presence of strong democratic institutions rather than the number of troop divisions and warheads it has.

In the end, there is no getting away from the idea that this "values gap" renders futile any attempt to lay a solid foundation on Russia's relationship with the West. In the absence of common values, relationships are formed in the manner of 19th-century German leader Otto von Bismarck, who was more concerned with a country's military potential than its perceived intentions. This is why Putin lives in constant anticipation that the West will play a dirty trick on him, why he cannot honestly formulate the reason for his irritation, and why he is unable to verbalize the rationale behind his never-ending and senseless rants about the Western military threat to Russia.

U.S. President George W. Bush showed greater flexibility than he has in the past by choosing not to leave office on a note of conflict with Moscow. In Sochi on Sunday, Russia and the United States produced a fairly pointless document titled a Declaration of the Strategic Framework of Russian-American Relations. It is amusing that in the opening lines of the document both sides hurry to convey the same thing they declared 28 years ago -- namely, that the relationship between the two sides was not confrontational in character. Putin unexpectedly declared that he felt a guarded optimism about the possibility of reaching an agreement over missile defense.

The real cause for Putin's satisfaction, however, was that Bush affirmed the legitimacy of Medvedev as Putin's successor. And this is why Putin can shelve the threat of more Cold War rhetoric -- until it is needed again.

Read the whole article here.

Friday, February 22, 2008

In Honor of Past Defenders of the Fatherland

Apparently, last month was the 65th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Leningrad. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the siege, or the Blockade, as it is called in Russian, on the city. The signs advising citizens which side of the street to avoid when the city was being shelled remain in one or two places on Nevsky Prospekt as a reminder. Survivors, or perhaps today their descendants, still lay flowers beneath them.

Even in the 1980s, infrastructure problems and dolgostroi issues were being blamed on the wounds the city suffered during the Great Patriotic War, and of course the devastation of some of the tourist attractions surrounding St. Petersburg was still being restored in this century.

Anyway, I thought I'd post, somewhat belatedly for the anniversary noted above but right on time for Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a photo of my own blockade relic. Not that I was a survivor of those hellish 900 days. No, my connection is a bit more tenuous and involves this document:

This is the certificate issued to recipients of the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad," received on March 6, 1944 by one Ivan Vasil'evich Nikiforov, if I'm making out the handwriting correctly. Although it now seems impossible, my memory of how I acquired this item is that it was tossed on the trash heap in the courtyard of the building where we lived in downtown Leningrad, along with the rest of the belongings of its deceased recipient.

Archival photos from wartime Leningrad can be viewed here.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Uninspired and overcommitted

For some reason, 2008 hasn't inspired me to write about anything in this space. Oh, I've been following events and collecting links for posts, they just never get written. Sometimes my would-be posts end up as addenda (also known as comments) elsewhere. So, in lieu of a post requiring any thought or research, and in order to avoid having January pass without anything new here, I'm posting a few photos from our summer '06 sojourn to Odessa and points thereabout. The full photoset from that day can be seen here.

Guy selling every imaginable type of light bulb at the 7th Kilometer Market
(officially the Avangard Market - read a great NYT article about the market here).

Кафе-Бар "Ё-Моё," Privoz Market.
The name is a phrase which means something like "Aw, Shucks," in the sense
that it's a euphemism for a commonly used vulgar expression. The window advertises
"assorted ice cream," "cold beer" and "hot dogs." We did not sample the fare.

I don't pretend to know Ukrainian, but I'm guessing the truck is labeled "Live Fish."
Also from the Privoz market. Read more about the market here.

In the beach/resort area of Zatoka, near the Karolino-Bugaz and Limanskaya train stations.
The yellow posters are promoting some sort of adult entertainment -
the sign says "Happy Titties Await You."

Beach in the area of Zatoka. The sign says (in Russian),
"Do not swim past the place indicated by the buoys."

The bulletin board of a "база отдыха" (recreation center, lit. "base of rest") named Micron -
the name is no doubt a relic from the Soviet era when some Research Institute's
employees and their families enjoyed one free trip per year to the Black Sea.
Now anyone can book a vacation there!

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Merry Merry

This year, we spent Christmas in Chicago (which is so lovely there's even a song about it). Driving in from the airport, I was impressed with the holiday decorations, and for some reason I thought of Moscow - another city administered by a politician who is self-enriching but beloved by city residents. The Christmas decorations in Moscow are truly spectacular, I have no idea what they've done this year, but here are a few photos from 2005 (there are a few more in this photoset):

On Kutuzovsky Pr-t.

Pushkin Square (on the southwest side
of Tverskaya, where the McD's is).

Mayakovsky Square, with a "Liberte" sticker that looked to me like it was done in holiday colors.

Pushkin Square, the Rossiia movie theater, and
Aleksandr Sergeevich himself.

Across the street from Luzhkov's office - Yuri Dolgoruky
dressed up like Santa (see this interesting article from a couple
of years ago about the Santa/Ded Moroz distinction as part of
the cola wars between Coke and Pepsi).

Best holiday wishes to everyone!

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Kaluga Kitsch

When we lived in Moscow, we were lucky enough to have a friend who had a house on the outskirts of Kaluga which she used as a dacha. One of my favorite parts of visiting the city was going to the central market. Here are a few photos - focusing on some of the cool signage - from July 2005:

The boat in the picture is named "Chernomorets"

The painting at left could easily be sold at any number of
Moscow galleries as nostalgia-inducing, Soviet-kitschy art.

More photos from that day - including lots of the painted products on mirrors like the cabbage in the image above - in this Flickr set.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Waiting in the PMR

Photo by LJ user nicolas_82, titled
"ожидание
троллейбуса нет и нет..."
("Waiting - but the trolleybus just won't come...")

I have blogged a fair amount about the PMR, the secessionist entity (or de facto state, depending on your preferred terminology) located along Moldova's eastern border on a patch of land called Transnistria, Transdniestria, Transdniester, Transdnestr or Pridnestrovie (again, depending on your preference and politics). AFOE has recently blogged about this troubled territory - not once, but twice - and a couple of Austrian journalists have just published a book on the region that looks like it will be interesting (I've ordered a copy and will try to offer some sort of review once I receive it); but it can be difficult to find voices from the region unfiltered by spinmasters working for or against the PMR's secession.

With that in mind, I decided to poke around in the universe of Russian-language LiveJournals and found a couple of interesting communities. Foto_pmr - the source of the photo above - is an interesting if not very often updated site with a diverse array of photos from the region. The Tiraspol city community ocity also has a wide array of postings - everything from the city's new anthem (picked up from Russian news agency "Novyi Region 2") to photos of "the PMR's Paris Hiltons" and a post about "Electronic music in Pridnestrovie." I decided to translate a couple of posts from the ocity community.

A rhetorical question when the barrel is pointed at your nose
When you go into the recently built IDK [InterDnestrKom] service center, you feel like you're in a European country - everything is so awesome and captivating, and also unusual for this area (mirrored ceilings... I've been waiting to see them for a while, and the wall in the Quake room is cool). Then you go to the passport department at the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] and understand that you're in far-off 1993, and it's the same old sovok, and nothing has changed in all this time - you show up with your own forms/sheets of paper from a notebook and fill them out. Watching this contrast for an hour, you involuntarily start to think, "What sort of a state do we have? A wealthy one or a poor one? And that right there, bro', is a dilemma. Practically a rhetorical question.

And a second post, in response to the first one:

To the post about the poverty and wealth of our republic
Whenever I turn on the TV (although that's only rarely), on the TV PMR "news" I often see clips about the expenditure of budgetary funds on such things, that you can't help but think, "How much money must we have, if we can afford that?"

Today I saw a story about the restoration of the "Druzhba" hotel. Was this the government's idea?! The report talked about how they're going to make this so-called hotel into something beautiful. But literally the day before yesterday I was in the hospital. Probably 70% of the equipment there is older than I am [the poster's profile says he was born in 1987 - trans.]. And this equipment is going to check my health, make me well and keep me alive if something happens! Many operations could be done much more safely and with less pain, if the doctors had decent equipment. They showed my friend that if he got operated on here, they would have to make a hole in him the size of a fist, and if he got it done in Chisinau, then they would make a small incision a centimeter long. Because there they have more modern equipment. There must be thousands of such examples in EVERY ONE of our hospitals.

That's why I want to know, is the hotel's reconstruction really worth the danger posed to the health of the citizens of this republic if they should happen to come down with anything more serious than the flu[?]

I want to see a business plan showing the projected profitability of this hotel and in general all of the expenditures from the government's budget. For example, on the website of the Supreme Soviet.

Comments to the post are interesting and state that the hotel is actually being renovated by its owner, a private investor (but question the demand for a luxury hotel in the city), and that the PMR's budgets are published periodically and available by subscription.

The Hotel Druzhba received a mention in one of Edward Lucas's reports from the PMR earlier this year:

The misnamed Hotel Druzhba (Friendship) used to be the only place to spend the night in Tiraspol. For connoisseurs of truly dismal Soviet-style rudeness, apathy, squalor and clashing shades of muddy pastel, it is still unmissable. As a place to stay, its noisy, draughty rooms, with their nylon sheets, uneven tiles, flimsy locks and eccentric plumbing, leave a lot to be desired.

For other discussions by Tiraspolians and other Transnistrians, you can also check out this online forum.

[Update: this item is now cross-posted at Global Voices.

Also, I'd meant to mention that one of the reasons I liked the above photo so much is that it reminded me of a scene I saw from the Chisinau-Tiraspol marshrutka - an elderly lady sitting on an elevated manhole cover by grazing her cow in front of a bank of unfinished apartment buildings. The collision of urban aspirations with rural realities made for one of those images I wish I'd had the chance to photograph.]

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Memory lane - 4th of July in Moscow - 2006

The Independence Day celebration organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia (AmCham) is attended every year by thousands of expats and Muscovites. According to the AmCham website:

The AmCham festivities are considered to be the largest commemoration of Independence Day outside the United States. In addition to one of Moscow's most extravagant fireworks displays, the day features musical performances by some of Russia's best-known bands, traditional American fare on offer from a variety of food vendors, sports tournaments and a special children's play area with moonwalks.

The event's venue – the historic Kuskovo Estate - provides a scenic reminder of Russia's rich and graceful past. Kuskovo is the ideal location for a day of family fun and celebration.

The event is indeed a lot of fun, if you have a high tolerance for corporate-sponsored entertainment and especially you've been in Moscow for awhile, in which case you will inevitably run into people you know. The last time we attended was in 2006 (here is AmCham's photo collage from the 2006 party) - I thought about posting these photos on the 4th of July this year, but didn't get around to it, so here they are a few months late:

Long-lasting Kuskovo culture meets
American-style disposability.

A Moscow cop in an unfamiliar role
as a guardian of Liberty

OMON forces were on hand to guard the main stage.

The fireworks show at the end of the evening.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Olympic dreams from the past

The Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics will no doubt shower riches (and white elephants) upon the people - and especially the leaders - of Russia's Black Sea coast. However, I doubt they will have the far-reaching and long-lasting influence of the 1980 Moscow Olympics on fences and gates throughout the post-Soviet space:

Veterinary Pharmacy, Floresti, Moldova
Taken on Aug. 1, 2006

Friday, September 21, 2007

"Radio PMR"

Two Austrian photojournalists who have done some work in Transnistria have placed an interesting collection of photos online. Some of the textual commentary is in German for now, but the photos are interesting nevertheless. It seems to be a fairly personal project (i.e., not as politicized as other online projects relating to Transnistria/Pridnestrovie), and the introductory page proclaims, "This is Radio PMR. News from our little Soviet Union."

The photos are broken into themes or little photo-essays and are organized by a table of contents of sorts. Definitely worth checking out - I was immediately hooked from the photo above, since it deals with the interesting situation of many people in the post-Soviet unresolved conflict areas, who have passports from their de facto state which are useless for international travel; in some cases, identity documents from the metropolitan state (in this case, Moldova); and often, a Russian passport, many of which have been issued based on applicants' tenuous connections to Russia as part of a strategy by Russia to create a basis for its ongoing presence in these regions.

"Passportization" has been a bigger issue in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where the residents were unable to acquire Georgian passports; and less of an issue in Transnistria, since many local residents were able to receive Moldovan travel documents. In these situations, the applicants for Russian passports needed the documents to travel internationally - sometimes to go to work in Russia - and were therefore happy to play along with the game.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Unknown Petersburg

The deadline for submitting photos to this contest has passed (and I'm sad to say that I missed it, too - but at least I can share a few of my SPB photos on Flickr - most of them pretentiously but non-optionally black-and-whitened for purposes of submission elsewhere), but you should still go to the contest information page to see the dozens of pages of submissions that follow (click on the numbers at the bottom), some of which are really amazing work and all of which make me want to go back to SPB with nothing but a camera and a lot of time on my hands. Alas, that's not likely to happen soon.