Babushka tunes
By Sergei Karpukhin
Life in the Russian provinces has never been easy. The absence of common utilities even now is not a rarity in villages: water is gathered from wells, stoves have to be heated up, the cattle watched, in the summer the vegetable patch needs tending…
All these tasks, and household chores in general, fall on the shoulders of the womenfolk, and in the villages where the young have left, they fall on the shoulders of the ”babushkas” – the grannies. Dealing with this workload has always been helped by song. Normally it’s those songs taught to you by your mother or grandmother in early childhood. The songs are passed from generation to generation gathering all the love, tenderness, happiness and sadness of the people who lived before.
These grannies from the village of Buranovo in the central Russian region of Udmurtia started their folk ensemble almost 40 years ago to sing these songs. Recently they have started to sing popular hits from Russia and overseas in their own language (more similar to Finnish than Russian). They were chosen by popular demand to represent Russia in the Eurovision 2012 competition. Their vitality, love and the sharp understanding of life inherent in their collective experience is an uncommon virtue, even among the young. Even if these wonderful seniors don’t get first prize in the competition, I feel their story will make them winners.
An accordion for Ablogin
By Vasily Fedosenko
To Vladimir Ablogin, it may still seem like a fairy tale, but as he touches his new squeezebox “garmoshka” accordion, which had covered thousands of miles to find him in his dilapidated wood hut, he knows what has happened is real.
I arrived in his run-of-the-mill Russian village in the Smolensk region at Belarus’s border on an early December morning to take pictures of local peasants voting in Russia’s parliamentary election. Looking like it was still from the Soviet era, the election day soon turned into a rare holiday in this backwater settlement, which was until recently prosaically named “Gryaz” (Mud).
Paying little heed to my presence and already warmed up with Russia’s national tipple, a bare-footed Ablogin sat on a bed in his higgledy-piggledy home, playing a traditional Russian “garmoshka” button accordion to amuse his audience of several women and men.
He played his scarred and worn-out folk instrument adroitly, running his fingers down its buttons and squeezing joyous tunes out of its tired bellows. Displaying no avid interest in the vote — now overshadowed by Ablogin’s improvised show — his few spectators quickly ticked their ballot papers and cast them in a portable ballot box standing nearby.
Femen gets naked for Putin
By Denis Sinyakov
“Young silly girls” that’s how Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov referred to Ukrainian Femen movement activists Oxana Shachko, Anna Deda and Irina Fomina. The three were sentenced to 5-12 days jail for appearing topless at an election site during the presidential vote in Russia on Sunday and imitating an attempt to steal the ballot box, which Putin had used to vote earlier in the day.
It was the first time Deda and Fomina had been in jail.
One wouldn’t be able to tell it was Fomina’s first ever protest the night before, when the women gathered to practice in a hostel room overlooking the Moscow river. I had never covered this intimate process of preparation for an act of protest before. Moreover, it was the first time I met the activists, and I barely knew their leader Anna Hutsol. That left me slightly confused.
The day before the elections, Hutsol replied to my request to come and photograph them, saying she would most likely agree. All day long, in my head I was going through pictures of Femen shot by Alessandro Bianchi in Italy, Gleb Garanich in Ukraine, photos that had won at the World Press Photo and POYi, trying to make mine different. My fears about repeating what had been shot already proved groundless, thanks to the interior of the Soviet-style apartment made into a hostel.
Good story. “Femen gets naked against Putin” would be a less misleading title, no?
Lucas
http://www.pictobank.com
Owners of The White Silence
By Anton Golubev
When I was a little boy, I adored the books of Jack London. The Nature of the North – that was the thing that captivated me. The White Silence; a chilling title, words that are hard to appreciate for a city dweller used to the din of cars and neon lights. The majority of Russians seldom leave cities further than to go to the dacha, the country houses that most people own just outside the city limits. Some might travel to some mountains or woodlands. Only a few will visit such a godforsaken place as the Russian North. The land where The White Silence reigns.
The North is a cruel place. Here, where the population density reaches one person per ten square kilometers, there is no transport links, there is nobody to ask the way, there is nobody to ask for a light or hot food, and there is little chance that anybody can help you if something happens. You can count on yourself only. The White Silence is a jingling calm when you can’t hear any sound around, it’s a thin line of a low northern wood on the horizon between two halves of the white nothing, it’s a blizzard when the boundless white Tundra flows together with the overhanging northern sky, it’s a half-strewed snowmobile track which you follow to reach the light and warm of a human dwelling.
It’s hard to imagine that somebody can survive in this cruel land except wild animals but there are some people who live there – the northern tribes people of Nenets, Khanti, Komi, Dolgany, Chukchy; the owners of The White Silence. These people arrived in the far north more than a thousand years ago, when the Roman age was finishing in Europe, and they became the owners of this severe land. They pasture reindeer and catch fish as their ancestors did for tens and hundreds of generations.
Portraits of Russian voters
By Will Webster
Russia goes to the polls on March 4, in a presidential election that present Prime Minister and former two term President Vladimir Putin is widely expected to win. Russian politics is a strange beast, opaque is the most constructive word to describe the process of moving and shaking that goes on in the corridors of power. A whole class of analytical Kremlinologists aim to shed light on the minutiae of the process, although opinions widely differ, and the outcome appears to be the same – 6 more years of Putin in top spot. In this atmosphere behind closed doors, with one outcome highly probable, it’s difficult to illustrate the campaign trail, if such a thing exists. However in this story of same old, same old, there is a group of individuals that stand out, that no one seems to ask about: the Russian people – they are the ones that cast the votes. People like Anatoly, an artist from Moscow.
Following a parliamentary election in December, one of the typical plays of allegiance shifting and maneuvering in the top levels of the power vertical something changed. Widespread claims of vote falsification brought out around 5,000 people onto the street in Moscow, a show of opposition to the authorities that hasn’t been seen for years. The movement grew, organized and strenghtened in the fertile fields of social networks. It provided leaders that in principal have no political leverage apart from a following online. People like Alexey Navalny, anti corruption blogger, and Yevgrnia Chirikova, an environmental activist battling the destruction of her local forest to make way for a new highway. Would they be able to maintain their voice of protest and public displays of opposition throughout the winter (a bigger problem for those not aware of it – ask the Grande Armee of 1812) in order to make a difference in the presidential vote? The protests did grow, a couple more followed, the numbers swelled – up to 100,000 came out to call for fair elections in January. The authorities seemed to be at a loss on how to snuff out this unplanned voice of opposition. Official plans were immediately drawn up to make the voting process more transparent, webcams in polling stations, symbolically see-through ballot boxes. Still, the unrest persisted. Another strategy was started – organized supporter events for United Russia, let the people know (on state run television networks) that actually most people are with Putin. By necessity these shows of support must be more impressive than that of these Muscovites wearing white condoms (Putin’s initial response when the white ribbons appeared on the street).
Aha – we have an angle, the people are moving, thousands and thousands of them, showing their support with their feet. But rather than faceless pawns, they are real people. People who want their vote to count.
Question for the interested news consumer: who are these people? Question for a news photographer: how to show this?
A pow-wow with the Russian Reuters TV and pictures team and regional chief photographers came up with the idea of picture postcards of normal Russians. As it turned out there was a series of protests/support rallies planned the week before voting, maybe a last chance to see. We thought – keep it simple, let the contrast between the different types of people, if there are any, speak for themselves. Typologies, collections of similar images, are often used photographically as a way to find similarities and differences not clear when looking at individual subjects in isolation. Applications of this approach are legion, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series of long exposure images of cinemas, or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black and white grids of industry.
Russia’s untouchables
By Denis Sinyakov
I don’t remember a time when Moscow hasn’t been flooded with them – migrants from Central Asia.
When I moved here in 1997 they were already here. They had started appearing more than 20 years ago, the time when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Some fled civil wars, but more often they were escaping the awful economic situation in their homelands. Not exactly an escape, but they came to make some money, leaving their families at home. The economic situation in Russia even now isn’t enviable, at the beginning of the 1990’s it was woeful, but none the less better than there.
Muscovites have got used to living with them, used to regarding them as low qualified workers, as street sweepers and lorry loaders, cheap muscle on building sites. People are used to calling them “churki” and “sheep” and not finding those words in any way offensive.
This is our Central Asia migration, is not Caucasian.
Tajikistan is country immigration donor for Russia.
Quiet moment of glory
By Peter Andrews
I woke up on the morning of August 19, 1991 after staying at my friends’ apartment in Warsaw. I was on my way back from holidays in Canada and had just sold my car before departing to the Soviet Union to start my new job at Reuters in Moscow. Previously, I worked for the Associated Press in the then-Soviet Republics of Lithuania and Georgia as well as in Moscow itself where Reuters’ former Chief Picture Editor Gary Kemper and Moscow Chief Photographer Frederique Lengaigne recruited me for Reuters.
A neighbor stopped me on the staircase saying: “Do you know what happened in Moscow?”. There was a military coup and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown by Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev. It seemed impossible to me, I had just left Moscow two months earlier. Nevertheless, I immediately arranged the first available plane ticket to Moscow. The plane was almost empty and the only people on board were my colleagues from Poland with whom I had spent the previous year working with in Vilnius. The atmosphere on the plane was tense, but full of excitement. The change was happening in front of our eyes, but not the way we were expecting.
Upon landing at the Shermetyevo airport in Moscow I went straight to the Reuters office which was then on the Sadovaya Samotechnaya Ulitsa part of the Sadovoye Koltso in the center of Moscow. We exchanged quick greetings and I was on my way to the White House, a building which then housed the country’s parliament, where everything was happening. The Reuters picture crew already working on site included Sean Ramsey, Michael Samojeden, Genady Galperyn, Grigory Dukor, and Viktor Korotayev.
In those days we were working with film and, as far as I can recall, Frederique was in the office all the time processing our pictures and sending them to the world. The atmosphere was intense and strange as there were thousands of people on the streets of Moscow protesting against the military’s presence in the center of the city. Sean Ramsey was taking incredible risks and getting amazing images, as did the rest of the team. Michael took a great picture the next day of Yeltsin on the balcony of the White House.
Armored vehicles were traveling up and down the center of the city with some trolleybuses burning. The next day was more peaceful but still intense with tanks surrounding the parliament building with hundreds of people walking in between them, putting flowers on the APC’s and waving victory signs. I was amazed to see my picture on the front page of the International Herald Tribune on August 21.
Amid fires the air is thick with prayers
The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin occupied the nation’s TV screens while reports of his bravado in fighting forest wildfires littered the media. The rest of the country were dead on their feet, choking with smoke as they fought the disaster.
Unable to depend upon Putin, government authority or new luxury equipment for assistance, locals grew weary as they defended their houses using an arsenal of tractors, farm equipment and shovels.
Some relied on their prayers.
A priest blessed firefighters in the village of Berestyanka before they continued on. Local residents conducted religious services asking God for rain to prevent new wildfires like the one that partially destroyed the village of Kriusha on August 5.
from FaithWorld:
Russian Orthodox take icy plunges to celebrate Epiphany
A man prepares to dip in icy waters during an Orthodox Epiphany celebration, with the air temperature at about -26 degrees Celsius ( -14.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pereslavl-Zalessky, some 140 km (87 miles) northeast of Moscow January 19, 2010/Sergei Karpukhin
A man gets out of the water during an Orthodox Epiphany celebration, with air temperature at about -24 degrees Celsius (-11.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in Suzdal, some 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Moscow January 19, 2010/Denis Sinyakov
A man helps a woman out of the Bazaikha river during Orthodox Epiphany celebrations, with air temperature at about -28 degrees Celsius (-18.4 degrees Fahrenheit), in the suburbs of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk January 19, 2010/Ilya Naymushin
Der Ball ist rund und das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten
“Der Ball ist rund und das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten” – the ball is round and the match lasts 90 minutes - words of wisdom from Sepp Herberger, known as the ’Miracle from Berne’, most famous as German national coach of the team which won the 1954 World Cup.
The other night we had something like a miracle from Vienna – Michael Ballack struck a thunderbolt free kick to send an unconvincing Germany through to the quarter-finals of the European Soccer Championshop 2008 with a 1-0 win over co-hosts Austria. Ballack’s free kick, right-footed into the top corner and clocked at 121 kilometres an hour by a German TV station exactly describes, what acording to another German saying, is the whole point of the game, “das Runde muss ins Eckige – the round thing must go in the rectangular thing.
So that is easy enough – isnt it??
1. Germany’s Michael Ballack (4thL) scores from a free kick during their Group B Euro 2008 soccer match against Austria at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna, June 16, 2008. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach. 2. Austria’s goal keeper Juergen Macho fails to save a free kick by Germany’s Michael Ballack during their Group B Euro 2008 soccer match at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna June 16, 2008. REUTERS/Christian Charisius
Here a some good examples picturewise as well as from a German fan’s standpoint, taken with a remote camera behind the goal – Germany’s Podolski scores past Poland’s goalkeeper Boruc during Group B Euro 2008 match in Klagenfurt. Well done and well shot! – you remember: das Runde muss ins Eckige
Germany’s Lukas Podolski (top) scores past Poland’s goalkeeper Artur Boruc (bottom) during their Group B Euro 2008 soccer match at the Woerthersee Stadium in Klagenfurt June 8, 2008. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
I have been searching for a photo of the helicopter dropping the bomb on Operation MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985. If anyone can help me with this, my email address is winwharton@gmail.com and I would be very grateful
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