Books : East by Anzenberger (part 4)

Last part dedicated to the book "East" edited and produced by Anzenberger Agency . I am in Vienna these days for the presentation of book "West" which is the second and final part of the project. I will talk more about West later on.

Chippendale's Erotic Dancers by Agnieszka Rayss

It looks a bit like a construction site: the red-and-white striped tape that separates the couple as they tentatively embrace. Which is the correct interpretation in a certain sense, because this is not really a “united ” couple. And so the construction-site tape really just underscores the meaning of this love: it is a “work in progress”. In any case it all amounts to the same thing: love is always a lot of work plus a bit of show, and the show is always more than appears on the surface; it’s always a projection of closet desires. In the present case the number might be called: muscleman and girl from the audience. It is no disadvantage that an embrace is the central and key element in multiple form. On the contrary: often proximity has the most to tell us about dormant distance, regardless of how it is interpreted. Sometimes the naked beau of the Polish erotic male dance ensemble Models FX holds his female fan tenderly in his arms before martially spinning her around. This is Eros as an adrenalin acrobat in a well-oiled macho costume. But that doesn’t make it a model of morality, rather an indication of the power that the world of superficial media images has always possessed. For many years Poland was spared the high-gloss media of voyeurism. Thus when the country was finally exposed to the rainbow palette of consumerism, it sucked the colours up like a dry sponge. Love from the days of a planned economy finally discovered the real article: the dream man.

St. Petersburg Kommunalka - Bolshevik Flat - Sharing by Max Sher

Cracks instead of wrinkles. Instead of age spots on their bodies, these houses get mould on the walls and the wrinkled remains of wallpaper beneath crumbling stucco. Old houses are like old people, and sometimes their eyes – the windows – get weak with age or blind. But they absorb the stories of their inhabitants and repeat them for a long time. St. Petersburg’s public housing is full of the traces of eventful lives. That by itself would be only an approximate perspective, but Max Sher’s pictures tell the story in particular of the blurred edges of an often difficult neighbourhood. There is a basic common motif to the Kommunalka project, the story of a failed experiment that began with the dreams of the Bolsheviks in 1917, when the brand-new revolution not only wanted to create new housing for workers but new workers as well. Shared bathrooms, WCs and hallways were more than just a compromise necessitated by a lack of space. They were also intended to consign the territorial thinking of bourgeois ownership to the dustbin of the past. But the dream of social community was fragmented into neglected zones and myriad neighbourhood skirmishes. Thus the sad transparency of curtains and naked proximity, of surrealistic kitchen still lifes with hand-saw and casserole: they tell the story of far more than the simply private spaces and lines of demarcation of emotional transit. They also lead the viewer along the intended point of fracture of political fiction.

Siberia's Forgotten Cities by Filip Singer

The subject is familiar: post-apocalyptic scenery inhabited, and sometimes terrorised, by nomadic hordes. Depending on the temporal situation of the plot, the newly created tribes have configured fictive worlds into new communities with the help of artefacts and rituals that have survived from the days before the catastrophe. As a rule they do not wear head-scarves in Filip Singer’s pictures. Nevertheless: the young Czech photographer spreads out a surrealistic landscape, and the sequence is all the more horrific when he is exploring not some distorted fictional image but rather the reality of the people stranded in distant Siberia and its cities. Norilsk and Mirny are mining towns encircled not just by ice and deep forests but also by the paper barricades of various visitor’s permits. The decline that set in with the collapse of the Soviet Union hit these workers’ colonies in the country’s Far East with full force. Thus the observer travels with Singer to a foreign archipelago of urban islands, into everyday life that seems almost unreal with its ice, mineral dust and tower blocks that seem to have been abandoned. A mine becomes a crater – what fell to earth here? And a coffee break becomes a conspiratorial meeting, whose only apparent goal can be a longed-for break-out. Even the children playing on the icy terrain are no exception – the horror of Hieronymus Bosch and the whacky obliviousness of a Mad Max are found here as well.

The Helpers of Chernobyl by Igor Starkov

The rays from the colour organ and the gaudy cold of its illumination. A medical device that has no intention of fitting into the cheerful ice-salon-pink of the background, no more than the pair of shoes parked in front of it. The emptiness of a room where one would most likely expect to find corrupt provincial parliamentary delegates. But the meeting is over, or it never took place, and only a single person is sitting here. The parts and the whole, the state and its servants, the atom and the devastating power of its split nucleus. There are many complex levels on which to consider the subject that Igor Starkov has made the framework of his essay on the aid workers following the catastrophe of Chernobyl. His takes are sterile and as silent as death. They exude something insidious, as though the devastating effects of contamination were far from over – which, indeed, is the case. And something else quickly becomes apparent: that this is no longer a question of life and death. Because that is a boundary that the few survivors have long since crossed; it’s something one notices immediately. Thus the strange inanimacy and silence found in many of these pictures is a highly accurate depiction of reality for the clean-up workers. In crass contrast to the manner in which the media made heroes of the New York fire-fighters, those who were hastily commanded to sweep up the debris of these shattered nuclear remains quickly disappeared from the face of the earth: overlooked by the state and by the world. And in the case of these silent portraits, who still testify to the event: so far by death itself as well.

Books : East by Anzenberger (Part 3)

Third post decicated to East Book edited and produced by Regina Anzenberger , this time I will introduce 5 essays from the book. The first one was my essay done on my project done in Chongqing which is technically to be the biggest city in the world. Again i want to remark the great work from Robert Haidinger in preparing the texts on each essay:


Chongqing : The Megacity on China's Horizon (by me......)

Endless suburbs, speckled with fallow land of concrete. And in the distance, at the hazy horizon, shimmers the diffuse verticality of power: groups of high-rises that could delude the viewer into thinking this is a city centre but is simply bigger than the other districts. The new skyline is radiant with indifference, and yet its shimmer hypnotises. No, megacities generally do not look democratic. The measure of urbanisation remains behind urban growth. And when such places create identification, they mostly do so indirectly in the form of barrack villages that can be wiped off the map if need be – like fly droppings on an urban-planning master plan. A megacity has grown up between the Yangtze and the Chia-ling rivers. Two and a half hours by plane from Shanghai, the city is already home to more than 35 million people – more than New Delhi and New York combined. The city is called Chongqing and is a new beginning and springboard at the same time. Chongqing is intended to adopt its share of the 150 million Chinese who are part of the economic giant’s biggest rural exodus in history. The urban conglomeration is already the most important bridgehead in opening up China’s West. Chongqing simply grows and grows, by half a million inhabitants per year, in an area the size of Austria, that cost 160 billion euros, and takes eight hours to cross by car. Whether such anonymous, semi-urban zones can offer real protection? Seeing the jacket worn over the head and the solitary silk umbrella in Mattioli’s pictures can make one imagine it: a feeling of security will remain a private matter for some time to come.

Young Russian : The Post-Soviet Generation by Rafal Milach

No ermine in sight. But no pictures of the losers in the new system either: the people sleeping in the metro and the street children who today define the flip side of the Russian economic boom. And when these young Russians in their steel-blue worker’s overalls peer into the camera, they are certainly not uniformed working-class heroes. Rafal Milach preferred to avoid the commonplace extremes. The superrich and the desperately poor: those images of the country’s sharp contrasts would have been a too simplistic subject. Instead, Milach turns his lens to Russian society where its future is manifest: the generation of 30-somethings. These are Russians for whom the USSR perhaps provided their early upbringing but who have grown up under the dripping faucet of Western pop-culture. The sometimes strange backgrounds – the high-rise flats behind the military jet, the bare walls of a student dormitory – provide at second glance something that soon seems almost familiar in its unimportance. At some point Milach’s essay takes on a dynamism of its own. That is noticeable in the authenticity of his emotional nuances. The more time the photographer invested in his project, the sharper the focus became. Soon the locations of his first images – military academies, correctional facilities– were supplanted by pictures of young people, who often enough became friends. The increasingly close contact and intimacy, but also the variety of the individual characters, thus tell us more, and more exactly, about the mood of a Russian generation than thousands of images of the extremes.

The Legacy of the Curds by Fatih Pinar

Life between old songs and the soil. Resting in the shadow of villages that often only exist in the memories of the old. It would probably have been setting sights too low to try to depict the drama of fifteen million Kurds through the eyes of radical left-wing resistance groups such as the PKK. That should be clear from the range of violence alone. Three thousand Kurdish settlements have been wiped off the map in recent decades. The number of displaced persons is estimated at 378,000. Thus the depth of the loss is also great, along with the scale of the destruction to this people who have their own language, traditions and history. As a rule location is also an important part of cultural continuity. A people defines itself, when not by a country, then at least by a region. This formula is really the basis of survival and thus of the future for this group of Kurdish cattle breeders and farmers. The density, inevitability and immediacy of these bonds is clear in Fatih Pinar’s pictures, which he took over a period of six years. The people and their ancestral homeland seem to be of one piece. The colour of the soil and the skin of the faces, the traces of destruction and the aspect of the present blur into a single, homogenous subject. Even the Kurdish language, suppressed by the Turkish state, seems to have grown stronger. What these pictures exude is a silence with the same colour of clay as Anatolia’s dust.

Inside Georgia by Janis Pipars

Leonardo da Vinci never made it to Georgia. But the “Last Supper”, the prototype of every scene that depicts the communication between body and soul is found here nonetheless. Not once but dozens of times. Beneath the gnarled trees of this Caucasian land and in its dark and gloomy farmsteads. The plastic tablecloths of the postmodern age, which tell of the power of metamorphosis and of the new face of the old table, may underlie the related triptych, but not cover it up. Georgia: wine and soul – that could well be the title. And: Georgia, the country of the grand gesture, behind which an even grander generosity is hidden, and of covered tables of archaic power. Janis Pipars has repeatedly been reminded of Leonardo’s “Last Supper”. Not that he set out explicitly with that in mind. Rather one could rightly say: along the way it was Georgia itself, directly, sometimes in rubber boots, on the dance floor and, in any case, from person to person, from host to guest of honour, from the grey of the periphery straight into the heart. The keywords were always: an inspired landscape, spirituality. That is what flows from these pictures. With open pores, just as sensual fragrances take over a poorly illuminated room where a banquet is being spontaneously held. And never as strong as when Georgia’s spiritual depth is embracing the people where a break with tradition has apparently taken place long ago: amidst the armour-concrete-fragmented structural physicality of kolkhoz and suburb.

Not Natasha - The Sex Slave Trade in Moldova by Dana Popa

A chair seat that has broken away from the frame, telling a tale of falling off one’s chair onto a false floor. A face hiding behind a brunette wig, telling the story of people disappearing behind a tissue of lies. An arm showing the marks that a belt wielded in anger can leave behind. Still visible now, but even after they disappear they remain forever. A white bed sheet. If one thinks of a wedding, death may be the bridegroom. And a terse newspaper ad, circled in black. One suspects the circle will reveal itself to be a noose, or as a tunnel from which there is no escape. More likely the entrance to hell itself. These are subtle signs that appear next to the women or in rooms that they have long since left behind. Other girls will follow, and with them the same delicate fragility that provides the basic motif for this essay. Moldova, the poorhouse of Europe, is a hub for an industry that is just as illegal as it is profitable: the trade in sex slaves. The later stages of suffering are well known: prompt delivery to the meat market a bordello, rape, beatings, confiscation of passports, the pressure towards drug addiction. Often schizophrenia is the result, followed by AIDS. A vicious circle that the Romanian photographer Irina Dana Popa has analysed in all its subtlety. Her pictures are of a screaming silence, of women for whom only one pathway to flight remains: the ghastly realm of inner emigration.

Books : East by Anzenberger (Part 2)

I am posting the second part of posts dedicated to the book "East" by the Anzenberger Agency. Here the presentation of other four essays printed in the book.


Longing for Maramures by Davin Ellicson

Is this what it is, the better life? Just because the people here still wear traditional dress and lie down in pastures among the woolly sheep ? Or are we only the victims of a romantic image? That should be for each of us to decide, but things are not that easy. Because it is difficult to talk about a region like Maramures and about a kind of everyday life that remains familiar to us only from old stories. Of course: the bread here tastes like bread, and the instruments have not lost their wild musical soul – that’s clear enough. As is the fact that the old women linger after the village festival is over, and that the traditional lifestyle always has its light and dark sides. But all we can usually do is surmise. Because you have to have lived in Maramures to gain a better understanding of Rumania’s most traditional region. And that is exactly what Davin Ellicson did. Here he lived and worked on the northern edge of the country. With a pitchfork and plough, but also, and especially, with a camera in his hand. He probably didn’t have a lot of time to stage idyllic scenes. The hay-sleds and horse-drawn carts, the lambskin boots and party guests, after all, represent themselves. But what one cannot yet see is the fatal erosion of a new economic reality: the influx of money, foreign investors, and an EU style of agriculture will radically change centuries of traditions within a very short time. The rich heritage of Maramures will then be reduced to note on the margins, added as an afterthought to the pitiless annals of the globalised world.

Ark of Albania by Bevis Fusha

A lek is a hundred qindarks; a fox flees through the snow; a path is a thousand steps. A horse can finally run free, perhaps anywhere it wants. There is something puzzling about the pictures of the young Albanian photographer Bevis Fusha. Something is distantly reminiscent of the flickering and poetic shaking that are part of the silent-film era, and the puzzle and its solution always seem to hang in an undecided balance. Fusha maintains this balance when he views his country from the inside, like the suggestion of a trace disappearing in the contre-jour as it heads into the distance. This lack of definition, which perhaps leads to nameless mountains but never to familiar places, may be there for a variety of reasons. Perhaps because the government kept its people in step during decades of Stalinist isolation. Probably also because the traces that Fusha follows with his camera are frequently older and more archaic than much that is found elsewhere in the Balkans. Blurred images also simply fit this corner of Europe. For Albania is a strange land. Countless karstified mountains. A people whose origin is lost in myth. A language that is a distant cousin of Europe’s established linguistic families. And a country name, Shqipëria, that means northing more or less than “eagle”. Gazing through Fusha’s peepholes into Albania’s present, one would hardly suspect that eight European capitals are hardly an hour away from Tirana by air.

Volga World by Christine De Grancy

A single word is enough to bring even the most hardhearted Russian to tears: that word is Volga, and the “Mother Volga” of Russian folklore brings everyone to their knees. More than a river, it is a legend. The Volga is Russia, homeland, fate – and the Russian soul. And as everyone knows, that soul is as deep as the Volga’s waters and sometimes equally impenetrable. Mother Volga unites all her children; the good and the bad, the straight-laced daughters of Yaroslavl, who gaze into eternity from their reopened convents; the Tatar women of Kazan, who know that beauty is a gift that should be packaged as ornately as a birthday cake. Lean back in your chair and put your Gogol away: the stories they tell about the Volga and that are reflected here and now in the waves can be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. Apparently immune from the changes of a tumultuous time – almost like actors in the slow splashing of an aquatic opera – these inexhaustible characters appear on the banks of the river, and all of them are authentic Volga children. That is evident in the atmosphere that Christine de Grancy has captured in her pictures. The river’s waves are always part of the picture, and despite their apparent gentleness there is always a touch of something unpredictable and potentially violent. Because beneath the surface of these pictures there is always a glimpse of surprising change, a harsh word, a deep emotion.

Belarus Portfolio by Andrei Liankevich

Is the story over or are we still in the middle of it somewhere? Is it the country itself? Is it Belarus that makes reality and fiction seem to be layered like transparencies? The pictures of Andrei Liankevich seem to suggest that at least. For example, when a lonely Communist marches across a foggy square. Or when a soldier poses in a comfortable armchair among his trophies: the naked antlers on the wall and the no-less trophy-like twin sons held tenderly and creepily on his lap – Nestor and Pollux? Remus and Romulus? Cain and Abel? If they are supposed to stand for a dually new beginning, this might take place once again within that historical cliché that has helped give Belarus its sense of unreality. History has certainly provided plenty of signs. No other region in Europe suffered as much during the Second World War as Belarus: the bourgeois intelligentsia were practically wiped out, the number of war victims was the highest relative to the total population, and the infrastructure was destroyed. Later the country was the remotely controlled ally of the old Communist powers, and the same clique is still in power today. And yet the very fact that Liankevich can depict the somnambulistic conditions of his country the way he does is proof that there is a young generation of Belarusians whose creativity is in the service of change. Fantastic elements of an unattainable dreamland and a caricatural focus on pseudo-Soviet deco-propaganda à la Lukashenko provide a backdrop against which innovation has been going on for a long time.

Books : East by Anzenberger (Part 1)

The Vienna based Anzenberger Agency will celebrate 20 years of Activity in May 2009 and with the occasion the second volume "West" will be presented . The first volume "East" which represent a photo-essay from 17 photographers was published last year. Is rare to see a photo agency representing photographers by publishing books and portfolios , Regina Anzenberger has been always active in promoting young talents with a special eye on the so called "Former East Countries".
I will introduction the book East in different posts,
Here the statement of the book edited by Regina Maria Anzenberger:
“The agency remains – is perhaps now more than ever – a place for photojournalists with the ambition to witness the world and produce exciting photo-essays that are visually interesting and journalistically relevant. A meeting place for photographers from both East and West. A family, not a factory, dedicated to photography and quality. A place for people with passion. A virtual home for photography in the midst of Europe, the beautiful city of Vienna.” Regina Maria Anzenberger, Vienna, April 2008 Publisher: Moser Verlag München Text: German and English 288 pages
size: 24,5 x 29,4 cm

Here the first four photo essays of the book , all texts written by photographer and journalist Robert Haidinger :

Life in a block of Flats by Andrej Balco


Dolphins are leaping across the wall, their leaps frozen against the blue background of the wallpaper. Then there is the reference to Alcatraz, but the floors of the cells are covered with industrial oriental carpeting. People, like furniture, sit between furniture, but there is also a touch of glamour in the chipboard ambience, not to mention the varied longings in the interior of the housing blocks. No, the inhabitants of these Slovakian prefabricated buildings probably do not behave as uniformly as might be suggested by the exterior of the omnipresent high-rises filling the suburban landscape. Built with the intention of providing affordable housing for everyone, the industrial structures of these buildings quickly became synonymous with a highly anonymous lifestyle, devoid of any individuality. This the point of departure in this photo essay by the Slovak photographer Andrej Balco. Who are the people in these prefab buildings? Is there a prevailing type, perhaps even a prefab person? These unavoidable questions are a natural response to something as stereotypical as these buildings, providing a starting point from which Balco undertakes his photographic exploration of these boxes full of everyday Slovakian life. What he brings to light creates a sharp and varied contrast to the serial façades: dreariness has been replaced by individuals, who have rescued their palms, baroque fantasies and eroticism by bringing them into their apartment block. A bit of heaven on a flat roof, a hint of countryside in the garage, if only as a pig in the boot of a car.


Macedonia Dreaming by Ivan Blazhev

A box is turned into half a knight’s helmet, but between the face and cardboard is an echo of the war; the game with bow an arrow seems anything but harmless, and more confrontations are waiting. Today the word Macedonia evokes the country’s recent past: folklore poses headlessly against a bare wall. Will a soapbox race ever lead beyond the courtyard? This is highly doubtful as well. The year 1991 marked a new beginning for the people of Macedonia. They opposed the horror of war, corruption and ethnic tension with a special human quality of their own: hope. The desires that implies are often compressed into a seemingly somnambulistic situation, which the filmmaker and Macedonian photographer Ivan Blazhev approaches from the inside out in his photographic “road movie”. For two years he worked on the project “Macedonia Dreaming”, documenting the idea of dreams as a bridge between what the people of Macedonia people desire and what does not exist. Geographic or even political classifications play a secondary role here – they are the last aspects Blazhev wants in this portrait of his homeland. The country rather transformed itself on a extra-territorial plane, which is revealed in “Macedonia Dreaming” as its real strength: namely the sum of the personal microcosms, some bizarre, some poetic, that he traces here.

The Girl from Szymanow by Jan Brykczynski

The high wall at the far end of the park – it might have been erected by Franz Kafka. A boundary that is more perceptible than visible and hidden in the soft fog: intangible and hyperreal at the same time. Like the severity that seems to surround the girls’ smiles like a hard case. The girls, the boarding-school and the wall against the temptation of the world. Brykczyński did not exactly make it easy on himself. That is revealed at every glance. The distance between the viewer and the motif is difficult to comprehend. And the place is as alien and rigid as an insect preserved in amber. These pictures have something unapproachable about them, even in those moments when an effort is made to wring a tiny bit of exuberance from the rigorous life of a boarding-school. The sleigh ride across the virgin snow; the dancers in uniform: these small freedoms are frozen here into minor escape attempts that are doomed from the beginning to fail. Education lasts four years at this Catholic girls’ boarding-school in Szymanow, an island to the south of Warsaw and really located somewhere between anachronism and timelessness. Education here used to be restricted to daughters from “better families”, but now the school is open to all strata of society. The rules, however, have remained the same. Clothing, schedule, etiquette: a long list of regulations leaves little space for individuality. That can be seen in the details, among them the wrinkles on bed sheets that seem to be resisting attempts to smooth them. And certainly the flowing white robes of the nuns with their charges kneeling beside them.

The Ferries of Istanbul by Sinan Cakmak

Crossing a bridge would be another possibility, and not a bad one at that: they also connect Europe and Asia. And they also have their place to place in Istanbul life, especially given the amphibious environment of this city. The peninsula and the water licking the shore of its salt, dirt and history, and three bodies of water at its disposal. There’s hardly another city in the world that thrives as successfully between low and high tide as this lovely metropolis on the Golden Horn. Thus it is more likely the traffic and the risk of being caught in a jam, especially on one of the bottlenecked bridges, that persuades many of the people of Istanbul to take the only real alternative plying its way from shore to shore: the popular ferry service. From the moment they cast off from a harbour mole, the real destination is neither Galata nor Karaköy: it’s a quiet moment spent watching the wake receding in the distance. Finally. Waiting or weeping on the waves of the waterway. And perhaps just as important: the chance for a tender embrace where the world is at its loveliest: in the no-man’s land between two continents. It’s no wonder that the announced threat to take the old ferries out of service and replace them with new ones sparked a wave of angry protests and had to be withdrawn. Sinan Cakmak lives in Istanbul, and the motifs of his photos capture the commuters’ trips, their moments of freedom and the range of their emotions as the ferryboats rock and roll across the water. One might say: the music of travelling from the city to the city.