Nurmuhamed

If you have nothing better to do, you surf around vkontakte.ru and look for Chirayliq material... Take a look at this inspiring album called "Isolation", so refreshing in the summer heat, isn't it? The lovely portfolio was created by Almaty photographer Ilyas Sadykov and also includes some nice backstage photos of the artist himself at work.

The model in "Isolation" is singer Nurmuhamed Nussipkozhanov.

Oh, and don't forget: Smoking papirosi is bad for your health...

Victory Day in Berlin

Berlin, May 2nd 1945:



The poet and war correspondent Yevgeny Dolmatovsky (in this context it could be relevant to note that he was of Jewish background), photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei in front of the burning Reichstag, carrying the severed head of a Hitler statue.

65 years later. Berlin, May 9th 2010:

Soviet Army WWII veterans gather at the War memorial in Tiergarten, near the Reichstag.



Then this chirayliq dude carrying a Soviet flag shows up:

And then I spotted this guy who looks a lot like Ainur. I wonder if he's Tatar, too?

See more of my photos from today.

(Colour photos by Tinet.)

Umida Akhmedova

At the end of last year, Uzbek documentary photographer and filmmaker Umida Akhmedova had criminal charges filed against her, and was accused of defamation and of "insult and slander of the Uzbek nation."

She was one of several people who were charged due to having participated in a project sponsored by the Swiss Embassy Gender Program. Akhmedova's contribution was the photo book Women and men: from dawn till dusk from 2007 - 110 photographs documenting aspects of life in rural Uzbekistan. In court, an expert panel of 'specialists in the fields of religious affairs, spirituality, and psychology' found that her images portrayed Uzbekistan in a negative light to Western audiences: "a foreigner who has never been to Uzbekistan, but who is familiar with this album, would reach the conclusion that [Uzbekistan] is a country where people live in the Middle Ages".

On February 10th Akhmedova was found guilty of slandering and insulting the Uzbek people, but could walk away free, as the judge granted her an amnesty in honor of the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence.

However, many fear that this case is "exemplary" - paving the way for many more cases like it against artists and journalists who are too critical or "unflattering".

Here are a few photos from Women and men: from dawn till dusk that are relevant to Chirayliq (click to enlarge!). See many more at fergana.info and datablog.info.

Comrades, 1950

Probably taken soon after the treaty of friendship between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China on 14 February 1950, and just a few years before the Sino-Soviet split... An unusual image of youthful international friendship from the Borodulin collection of Soviet era photography. Other interesting images include a visit by workers from the Caucasus in Moscow 1925, muscular Komsomol youths, and this nice 20's photo of Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, Pasternak and other cultural personalities welcoming Japanese visitors.

Uzbekistan in the 1930's

The professional photographer Max Penson documented life and ideals in Soviet Turkistan (today's Uzbekistan) that was going through enormous social and economic upheavals in the early 20th century. Penson was born to a poor Jewish family in Belarus, 1893, and escaped pogroms and persecution to Central Asia during the First World War. He worked as an art teacher in Kokand, but his life changed when he managed to obtain a camera in the early 1920's. Between 1920 and 1940 he produced 30,000 photographs of innumerable subjects including education, industrialization, military training, farming, leisure and portraiture. At the Paris World Exhibition in 1937, Penson was awarded the Grand Prix for his portrait of "The Uzbek Madonna", a young woman nursing her child. Sergei Eisenstein praised him for his dedication to his chosen homeland: "There cannot be many masters left who choose a specific terrain for their work, dedicate themselves completely to and make it an intergrated part of their personal destiny." (quoted in Enter)



Penson worked for Central Asia's largest newspaper, Pravda Vostoka, in Tashkent, until Stalin's purges of Jews in the late 1940's pushed him out of his position and into a decade of depression. Penson died in 1959, but his work lives on as a priceless document of a dynamic but also tragic chapter in Central Asian history. All these photographs were selected from the official Max Penson website. I sincerely recommend a visit to the website for much more information and photographs. There is also an interesting topical selection at the Nailya Alexander Gallery.



Students in class.



The sculptor Khaidarov at work on a Lenin bust.

Although I have selected images chiefly of Chirayliq interest, I hope that something of the wide range of Penson's techniques is conveyed to the casual reader. He created images for propagandistic purposes, but he was conscious of the importance of the human element - you may call it imperfection or an element of chance.



A cotton farmer resting.



Russians and Uzbeks celebrating a holiday - with a dombura, or is it a dutar?

While the propagandistic elements may come off as blatant - a bust of Lenin, a militant pose, a brand-new tractor - the human element is much more subtle, yet crucial: a wrinkled eyebrow, a shy smile that does not quite reach the mouth, a bemused gaze, a gesture of tenderness. Penson told his photographer son's editor: “My son is using a flash in his photos very often. Tell him to use his heart instead...” (Quote: Enter)



Portrait of an Uzbek man.



A soldier with field radio equipment.



An Uzbek boy with puppies.



Max Penson himself.

Do NOT miss the gallery section at the official Max Penson site. This is just a tiny selection! It's a must for anyone who is interested in Soviet and Central Asian history, and the art of photography.

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.

"The Arctic is my home"

Viktor Zagumennov, right, has been photographing the North for 30 years. He has received the World Press Photo award twice, and his work has been featured in exhibitions all over the world.

(All photos in this article can be clicked for larger view.)

Left: By the roadside - two men in a remote part of Russia, year unknown. "The face of Russia" ... "Simple, good faces!" ... "Workers! The ones who keep the world going!"... That's some of the comments the photo has received from other photosight.ru members.

In his photos, Zagumennov has first and foremost devoted himself to documenting the everyday lives of rugged northern men and women.

Zagumennov himself grew up by the North Sea, and he says this has given him a special relationship to the modest northern nature, the darkness of the long nights of winter and the never setting sun of summer.
His passion for photography was sparked in 1st grade, when his parents bought a cheap Smena camera. He eventually went on to study photojournalism at Moscow State University.

He was assigned his first professional photoreportage in June 1977, for the newspaper Trud. The theme was "The mighty Soviet North", documenting the achievements of industrialization on the route Surgut - Nadym - Salekhard - Yamal Peninsula.
When Zagumennov set out on the trip, he was full of expectations coloured by the romantic landscapes of his childhood - "white nights, northern lights, fishermen at lakes like mother of pearl", as he describes it in his bio. "And suddenly it all changed. I saw the disfigured nature perishing under the barbaric onslaught of civilization; stern, unsociable people meeting each plane from the Big World, watchful - what will they bring this time, the 'aliens'. I realized the great hypocrisy of what was going on - [in our reportage] we were about to glorify murder, sing the hymn of the Molokh of oil, which was exterminating entire civilizations of northern people without mercy."
He says he accomplished little of any worth during this trip, except one photo: Reindeer herders of the North.



The photo was made at holiday festivities on the Day of Youth. The men are inhabitants of the village Aksarka in the tundra of Baydaratskaya Bay. They are Komi, Nenets, Khanty and Selkup. This photo (which was given the World Press Award in 1980) inspired Zagumennov to devote himself almost exclusively to photographing the people of the North.



These two photos are from a series on walrus hunters, Sireniki Eskimos on the Chukchi Peninsula in the village Sireniki in the mid-1980's.

Right: During class, unknown location, somewhere in the North, featuring a teenage boy with incredible eyes.

Several collections of photos by Viktor Zagumennov can be viewed on Photopoligon.
Don't miss the photostory from August 1981 about Gavrila Nikiforov, a Koryak man living by himself with his dogs by a river in Kamchatka, 20 kilometers from the nearest village. He hunted nerpa seal, fished and collected berries and herbs. The only things he needed which nature could not give him were bread and sugar, and these were provided to him by hunters, fishermen and the fishing inspector whenever they passed by. Zagumennov mentions that a flock of wild geese were hanging out at Nikiforov's house. They lived there every summer and had learned not to be afraid of him, but would fly away if strangers approached.

Here are some other galleries with Zagumennov's photos:
Zagumennov's official site - nordart.ucoz.ru
More photos at photosight.ru
and photoforum.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.