Rest In Peace, Great Singer

Just a few days ago, we blogged about Aldyn-ool Sevek, the Tuvan master khoomeizhi ("throat singer"). Today, the New Research of Tuva published sad news: Aldyn-ool Sevek passed away after a long struggle against illness.

He was able to spend his last days in his native home at the Mongun-Taiga, the "sacred wilderness" of Tuvinian nomads.

A dated, but still unique and fascinating documentary about this region was produced in 1989, just at the end of the Soviet era.

Real Men!

A Mongolian horseman, photographed by Oksana Kalyuzhnaya (source: photosight.ru) in the Khövsgöl province.


Another horseman, a herder photographed by "Gorynych - The Green Serpent" at photosight.ru.

Of dogs, men and Russian photographers

These phots are from the photo community photosight.ru, a true treasure chest of Russian photography, both professional and amateur.
Click the images for larger view.



Love that sweeps you off your feet by Vadim Shapovalov, somewhere in Central Asia. A herder is the object of his dog's desire ... Shapovalov says that he half-heartedly fought off the dog's advances. It looks like he is smiling.
Otherwise Vadim Shapovalov mostly photographs beautiful young women. See more of his photos here.



Pictures in the sand, by Daysse. Daysse (Dasha Savina) also doesn't say which location this is, but since she is based in Vladivostok, it's quite likely that it's on a beach near that city in the Far East of Russia.
She makes mostly portraits, and there is another very nice photo of this gentleman (but without the doggie).



District police officer in the taiga, by nordart (Viktor Zagumennov), near the village Baikit, Evenkia, 1998.
Viktor Zagumennov is a world famous photojournalist, who has been active in the field for 30 years now. Learn more about him in the next post ... Here is a more extensive gallery of his work.

The colour photographs of Sergei Mikhailovitch Prokudin-Gorskii

This topic was suggested to us by a reader. I had seen some of Prokudin-Gorskii's fascinating photographs before, but I hadn't realised to what extent he had made portraits of handsome Central Asian men ...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was an innovator in colour photography. In the early 1900's, he formulated an ambitious plan to document the Russian Empire in full colour. He wanted to educate the empire's young citizens of its vast and diverse history, culture and modernization.
Tsar Nicholas II supported this project, and in 1909-1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

According to Wikipedia, "his process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly-colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
He also successfully experimented with making color prints of the photographs, but the process was complicated and slow. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one."

The resulting images give a unique insight to an era we are used to seeing in monochrome only.

The Library of Congress has made a large amount of his photographs of landscapes, architectural monuments, industry, transportation and people available on their site. Here is a small, unsorted selection of his portraits from the vast Russian Empire ... Click to see them larger.


A fabric merchant in Samarkand. Note the framed Koran page above the stall.


Georgian tomato merchant near Sochi.


On the Registan, Samarkand.


A tea room in Samarkand.


A shashlyk restaurant in Samarkand.


A shepherd outside Samarkand.


At the Salyuktin mines on the outskirts of Samarkand.


A carpenter in Samarkand.


Fat tail sheep on the Golodnaya steppe.


Nazar Magomet, Golodnaya steppe. Note the doggie!


A Turkmen man posing with a camel loaded with sacks, probably of grain or cotton. Camel caravans remained the most common means of transporting goods in Central Asia well into the railroad era.


A young Bashkir.


A Bashkir switchman near the town of Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountain region of European Russia.


Packaging department, Borzhom (today's Borjomi, Georgia).


A man in a courtyard, place unknown.


A shashlyk restaurant, Samarkand.


Doctors in Samarkand.


Mullahs by a mosque, Azizia, Batumi.


A Sunni Muslim man of undetermined nationality in Dagestan.

Finally, here is a black and white photograph, which nonetheless has very interesting subjects ...


Barbers in the Registan, Samarkand.

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)!

Siberian Life

Evenk reindeer herder in Kusur, Yakutia.


Sergei, Yakut horse herder. (If you think he looks cute, wait till you see the kind of horses he is herding...)

Misha Moldanov, Khanty of Siberia. The above photo was taken by Scott S. Warren, who has written several articles about everyday life among the Khanty people. For more quality photos see: Report From Siberia: Life In A Khanty Reindeer Camp and Report From Siberia: Making A Living. Moldanov is quite a popular photo model: here's a colour shot at Brian & Cherry Alexander Photography. The latter website has many interesting galleries of various native peoples of the Arctic region, from Inuit and Saami to Nenets, Yakut and Cree. Especially the people's interaction with their dogs is interesting - they are dependent on them for survival and treat them as companions, yet not pets. You can see how many of the dogs enjoy being with their human families, even though their life is hard.