Legs, Wings and Tails

There’s a Soviet cartoon that tells the story of an ostrich and a vulture, who are on a quest to find food in the desert. The vulture claiming that she knows where the food is, offers the ostrich to “fly there” quickly. As the former takes off the ostrich obviously starts following him by land. Astonished and dissatisfied the vulture stops and turns to the ostrich: “I said ‘let’s fly’, not ‘let’s run!’” The ostrich just lifts his rudimentary wings as an excuse. Insisting that all birds should know how to fly and it’s better “to lose one day but then to fly to the place in five minutes” the vulture starts training the ostrich to fly. But eventually the ostrich, trying to take off, overruns the flying vulture, leaving her way behind. Realizing that her legs are much faster than any wings, she turns to the exhausted vulture and says: “Wings… It’s the legs that matters!” The cartoon finishes with the lizard sitting nearby and watching the scene. After all she saw, the lizard concludes: “Wings… Legs… After all it’s only the tail that matters!”

The reason I recalled this little cartoon was the following photo I took a few months ago in Istanbul:

Portraits of 2011

Dear 2011! Thank you very much! You were such an awesome year to me. I’m sorry that I didn’t trust you in your beginning, but thankfuly you’ve turned out to be so good despite my suspicion. Finally, I had a job that required traveling, so much of it that I even got sick of planes and hotels. Finally, I had an opportunity to work on and finish a big chunk of a long-term project and have the first ever personal exhibition. You have showed me how to be attentive to people’s faces and gestures. You showed me a little how to tell stories through the portraits. You’ve been good to me both in professional and personal departments. Thank you for teaching me how to be happy and for giving me an opportunity to be such.

To show you my appreciation, take these portraits as a gift from me, in order to see through people who’ve lived through you, how beautiful and vivid you were.

Thank you once more. Спасибо. მადლობა. متشکرم. Teşekkür ederim.

Gold panning in Svaneti. January.

65-year-old Rezo “Mackenna” Gurchiani during the gold panning process on the Inguri River, Svaneti, Georgia. Gurchiani, who got his nickname after the Gregory Peck character, Marshall Mackenna, who, in the 1969 adventure flic “Mackenna’s Gold,” dedicated his life to pursuing a hopeless dream of gold.

The Documented Kiss

Recently I came across a marvelous photo that stroke me as a marvelous photo should strike. The picture of a young couple kissing so passionately on the pavement during the Vancouver unrest that it seems that they’re close to make love haunted the Internet shortly after it was taken. However, as one of the blogs stated it the true story behind the picture that worldwide bloggers dug out, illustrated how “photos lie.” On the photo a guy is kissing his injured girlfriend out of compassion and comfort, even though it looks like a passion kiss.

A kiss during the riot (C) Richard Lam, 2011

However, to me the statement about the mendaciousness of photography seems to be a little one-sided, and looks like an attempt to get rid of the responsibility of how we ourselves perceive the world. Being a objective combination of colors, shadows and light, it just visually depicts what was there. After seeing a photo most of us do awwwww, and the cliche “make love not war” phrase pops up in our minds. But the true story behind the picture it happens to be a bit less emotional to our looking-for-extremes taste: it’s a kiss of comfort, not passion.

36 Bullets

On the first day of May everything seemed to contribute to my bad mood: non-stopping rain, sleep deprivation (I had to take my friend to the airport early in the morning) and the fact that I wasn’t happy with some of my projects. So when this paper arrived, I thought that it’s a logical continuation of my bad patch. The paper said that I was called for a 18-day-long military reserve service. That was a serious interference with my schedule, but after some time of cursing I tried to look at it from the positive perspective: it was only 18 days; it was not the busiest time for me; it was the best time weather-wise since it was not hot yet; I would get some good sleep and exercise.

The only thing was that I could not take my camera to take pictures there. I heard that there was the 500 lari (~$300) fine for taking pictures on the territory of the base. So after some hesitation I decided to leave camera at home, in order not to get tempted to take it out and start shooting.

Georgian Army. Reservists are trained to help them in hard times. Well, at least that’s in an ideal situation. © Temo Bardzimashvili, 2007

Instead, I decided to take a notebook to describe in words all interesting scenes I would have taken pictures of if I had camera there. So here they are:

Similarities (continued)

A few months ago I wrote the post about similarities in photos taken by different photographers. I pondered that similarities could occur both intentionally and unintentionally. The post has eventually won some popularity, at least compared to my other ones.

Recently my friend, an American photojournalist Amanda Rivkin posted the heart-wrenching text dedicated to the memory of two photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, killed in Libya on April 20, 2011, while covering the civil war there. In her post she used likeness of some of her and Chris’s photos. Kudos, Amanda, for such a great post and last tribute to the two great photojournalists!

Meanwhile, another friend of mine came across a photo, that amazingly resembled one taken by me in Georgian mountains:

Children singing to drive away harmful birds, (from the series Snow Country, Torioi Festival) Kuwatordani, Niigata, Japan, 1948 © Keisuke Katano for Hiroshi Hamaya courtesy Studio Equis

The residents of a Georgian mountain village leave the cemetery for their homes after the remembrance of the dead ceremony. It is believed that spirits follow them to their houses to live there for a week. © 2010

On the Use of Culture

In one of Georgian classic movies an elementary school teacher asks her students what benefit people get from the barn-door fowl. For the hen, the duck and the goose children answer pretty quickly: down, eggs, meat. However when asked about the benefits people get from keeping the rooster, one lad couldn’t recall any of such. After some struggling finally he answered: “it poops.”

Now back to why I started writing this post. Recently Georgian government announced one of Georgian highland regions Svaneti to become an international ski resort. And not just a regular one, but a year-round one – the mountains there are tall enough to hold snows even during the summer. Plus, the resort is within the driving distance from the sea coast. The idea is that a vacationer will be able to swim the sea and then to ski within the same day.

A village in Svaneti. 2010

Emotional Rescue

You’re too deep in
You can’t get out
You’re just a poor girl in a rich man’s house
Yeah, baby, I’m crying over you

The Rolling Stones, Emotional Rescue

A few weeks ago two events happened on the same day. First sparked the worldwide uproar, in virtually every person that follows the news on TV, the Internet, radio and printed media. Second was probably less emotional and more specific, but also was expected by global audience. I am talking about Hosni Mubarak’s resignation and World Press Photo 2011’s awards respectively.

Now, these two events may seem not to have much in common, but in fact they do. Both of them show how different people see the modern world and as a result, tendencies in contemporary journalism.

Bibi Aisha, disfigured as punishment for fleeing her husband’s house, Kabul, Afghanistan. © Jodi Bieber, 2010

Let’s look at World Press Photo winners. The Photo of the Year depicts an afghan girl mutilated by Taliban. A very strong and emotional image. But photography wise this image leaves a lot to be desired. IMHO of course. It doesn’t require much skills to take a very, very staged photo of a girl when you have plenty of time and artificial light. However, it does take a lot of courage for the girl to agree to a photo session. But all that strikes us can be put in a few keywords: mutilated young girl, Taliban, Afghanistan, religious fundamentalism, Islam. For a westerner a lot of negative messages. Show it to a regular Afghani, who sees those things frequently, and I wonder if they will be struck by it.

One of the best examples of how to create an interesting visual story: a photo series about a traveling cinema in India. © Amit Madheshiya, 2010

Chkhinka

His name was Chkhinka — Georgian for “skinny” — which he really was. At the moment of his entrapping a young male wolf living in the spreads of Georgian Vashlovani National Park probably lacked food and was all skin and bone. When scientists from bio-conservation organization NACRES caught him in August 2010, the sheep, wolves’ easy meat, was entirely in the mountain pasturelands.

Chkhinka at the moment of his entrapping. Photo courtesy of NACRES.

Chkhinka’s entrapping and GPS-tagging was a part of the Georgia Carnivore Conservation Project, which aims at conserving the biodiversity of Georgia’s semi-arid landscapes and improving the coexistence of people and wildlife.

Bejan, senior biologist at NACRES, who GPS-collared Chkhinka, logged the event: “It was very hot … and we were concerned for the animals well-being as there was a real risk that it could overheat. We managed to keep its’ temperature down at a safe level by using wet tissues Finally, we collared the animal. When he woke up, we could tell that he was in good condition and so we let him go to the forest. Soon after that we received the first signal on the VHF receiver.”

Bejan GPS-tracked Chkhinka and another collared wolf Kora for two months roughly. The two trails moved nearly parallel to each other and adhered to the boundaries of the national park. Sheep herds were returning from the mountains for winter to their winter quarters around the park, and wolves follow them, while being based in relative safety on the territory of Vashlovani protect area.

2010 in photos

My 2010 in my photos, of course. I must say it was quite prolific, mostly in terms of trips. Highland Georgia project, Ukraine (wanted to get there for a long time!), photojournalism workshop in Istanbul, then Iran. It was even more important, that I started some of my long-term photography projects. Anyway, here’s my year 2010 in compacto.

New Year in Armenia

I spent a few days with my friends in Armenia in the very beginning of 2010. No snow, but better than meeting New Year at home (many would argue with this). Here’s my post after this trip.

Working on the highland village story in Svaneti

Tehran Taxi

Oh boy, haven’t written anything for this blog for roughly two months! It’s not because there was nothing to write about, quite the opposite, was in too much bind to do it. However, a surprise was to find out that the number of viewers during this period hasn’t decreased decpite that I wasn’t writing as intensively (well, I didn’t write that intensively before also, just twice-three times a month).

Anyway, the last couple of months turned out to be really interesting. The champion, however, was my trip to Iran. I planned to visit Iran for the last two years, but have managed to go there only in the last October.

My impression after this some-ten-day-long trip is: Iran is gorgeous and so diverse! It’s not that I saw that diversity by myself, Tehran and some part of Mazandaran province, where I managed to go during these ten days, are only a tiny part of the country. Eventually I got some impression of Iran as a whole after buying Our Homeland Iran book of photographs by a splendid Iranian photographer Nasrollah Kasraian.

Anyways, even that small part of Iran I saw is too manifold to be described in one blog post. Thus I decided to write about  its only one, yet very representative aspect: the taxis.

If you think that New York City is a capitol of taxis, you should go to Tehran. In contrast to yellow NYC cabs, in Iran taxis are less apparent. But their diversity in color, size and age is well-complemented by strong individuality of each driver, including his/her manner of driving.