Sergey Maximishin, photojournalist

Let's just say this is "Professional photographer week". I've been browsing the LiveJournals of Russian photographers lately, and found plenty of exciting works.

Sergey Maximishin, born in 1964, grew up in Kerch in the Crimea. He served in the Soviet army as a photographer the Soviet Military Force Group on Cuba from 1985 to 1987.
After the army, he studied physics and worked in the laboratory of scientific and technical expertise in the Hermitage Museum. In 1998, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Faculty of photojournalism. For the next five years he was a staff photographer for the newspaper Izvestia, and since 2003 he has been working with the German agency Focus.

One of Maximishin's recent reportages is about Oymyakon in the Sakha (Yakut) republic, one of the coldest places in the world. "Here the petrol freezes, and the milk is stored in slabs in the basement", as the lead paragraph in Stern magazine says.


A cowboy rides one of his livestock. Maximishin's photos from Oymyakon were featured in German Stern magazine, Russian Русский Репортер and Polish Przekroj. He shares scans of the articles on his blog.


A fisherman on lake Sevan, Armenia.

Below are a couple of photographs from the Allaihovsk region in Sakha. Maximishin writes: "500 kilometers north of Murmansk. Yearly average temperature is -15 degrees centigrade. The surface of the region is slightly bigger than Bulgaria. The inhabitants number 3200 people. 33 square meters per person. Or 0,03 people per square kilometer."


A reindeer herder plays with his doggie.





Reindeer herding, hunting and fishing are some of the main occupations in the region.



See more of Maximishin's photos from the Allaihovsk region.

Many more wonderful photos can be found on Sergey Maximishin's website - maximishin.com (in English) - as well as his blog - remetalk.livejournal.com (in Russian)!

Takiji Kobayashi

"1920s proletarian novel strikes chord with young underemployed" - The Japan Times, Friday, July 18, 2008



I first read about Takiji Kobayashi (小林 多喜二 1903-1933) in the Finnish socialist literary magazine Kirjallisuuslehti (1934, p. 290). He was a politically conscious writer and dissident in imperial Japan, tortured to death by the police. His rediscovered novel, Kanikosen ("Crab-Canning Boat", 1929), deals with the difficult working conditions and labourers' collective struggle 80 years ago, and the modern-day part-time proletariat has discovered its relevance.

Shinchosha Publishing Co. said that in a normal year around 5,000 copies of the book would be reprinted. But this year, it has already printed nearly 380,000 copies.

The Japanarchy blog has a big post on Kobayashi, including many images of the manga based on Kanikosen. The comments include valuable discussions, too (how often do you see that?!). A must-read if you are interested in radical labour activism and Japan in the 1920's and 30's. Warning: The post includes some difficult photos of the deceased Kobayashi.
Here is a 10-minute clip from the 1953 movie by Sô Yamamura.

And here's an article by a guy who worked at fish-processing ships himself, and what he felt when he read the manga versions.

(Crossposted at 1920 A.D.)