smile please

I have to include this photo of V from that evening - mainly because of the surreal experience of absent-mindedly testing out my very-cheap-compact-camera's 'smile recognition' mode on him; and finding out that it really would not take a picture until he actually smiled, and then doing it automatically without any input from me.

As for V, it went totally against the grain for him. Not the smiling bit, which he does a lot, but being forced to smile against his will by a machine.



*Finally found the definitive article on why Russians do not smile in public; consisting of 14 separate, detailed points. The meaning of a smile? Why do Russians smile so seldom?

can't believe it!

Can't believe it! I have been using a very cheap compact camera to take photographs for this blog (it is a rule of mine not to use anything more fancy) and have only just noticed - after having this one for over a year - that it takes panoramic pictures by stitching 3 images together. Well, I just thought it did one of those stretched image size things so have never checked it out... and then found out by accident whilst wandering home via Metro - hence not a brilliant example.

 So - now I have to decide if photos like these are within my blog-photo-rules or outside of them....  

resolutions

I am not a great fan of New Years’ resolutions but –following a long conversation with Russian colleagues about the many important sights/sites in Moscow I have NOT yet visited - have returned here determined to regain my inner tourist in 2011. 

I guess that after a while living in any country/city you get out of the habit of really looking at what’s there and just begin to live in that state of everyday distraction which constitutes normality. Which is nice in one way, but also feels like a blurring of the reasons for moving somewhere else in the first place.  As a method for reviving my initial enthusiasms I have begun making a list of things to see. This starts with the major museums (Tretyakov, Pushkin, MMOMA, all of which I can’t believe I have not yet been to); goes on to all those fabulous looking house museums and other architectural stuff (such as the Shchusev Museum of Architecture) for which Moscow ought to be more famous; and then moves towards a, as yet, rather rougher and shorter list of contemporary culture and events – restaurants, bars, shops etc, which I consider my answer to the Wallpaper City Guides. In fact, the whole project keeps threatening to segue into one of those 10 Best Things to See in Moscow if you are a Culture Vulture lists, an inclination I am trying to resist. And this is even before I get to all the potential sights near the city, let alone trips further afield.

Anyway, I decided to make my NYR public here, so that you all can keep me to these good intentions (which I always thought was the only way to keep to a New Year’s resolution). Oh, and any recommendations for good and unusual places to add to my ‘tourist’ visits are also welcome. 

There remains only one issue, and slight crisis, which is to do with photography. This will only be of interest to camera buffs, so everyone else can stop reading here. I set a rule when I first started this blog – not that I told anyone else – that each post would only have one photographic illustration and that I would only use my little ‘point and shot’ compact (a Ricoh GR since you asked). I liked the idea of a restriction, a kind of what -you-see is-what-you-get approach without the possibility of any fancy footwork. I still like this idea; the problem is that the Ricoh collapsed on me when I was in Sydney – cameras do like to pack up when you are on trip-of-a-lifetime type excursions – and is still behaving very eccentrically. I also have a Lumix GF1with a couple of lens, a relatively recent purchase after my original much-loved, elderly and very oversized Fuji S2Pro digital SLR finally died and Fuji stopped making high-end consumer cameras, damn them.

This, then, is the issue. Whether to just go over to using my Lumix (which breaks the initial rule) or to go out and buy another compact, which will take a lot of fluffing around in selection, cost, country of purchase etc. A difficult decision...

(....and sorted almost immediately by buying a the cheapest Fuji compact available at the airport, and using my Lumix just when I feel like it!)

Photo above is of a photograph I bought recently - just to show I do get out and about a bit - from the first student art fair being run at ArtPlay. Interesting to see what the next generation are doing; much still quite derivative, but lots of creativity.... this is by Alena Beljakova. For more go to http://perhydrol.deviantart.com/gallery/

wedding jam

GUM is one of the particular places of choice for wedding parties to go to have their photographs taken. I don't know why this Saturday was so popular, but there were so many different groups they kept bumping into each other. Very enjoyable to watch.

photo icons

Icons 1960 - 80 is a photographic show currently running at the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, a new place which opened last month at Red October, with a bookshop, a gallery, and - I think - a lecture hall, library and café, (but which weren't open when we went). These are all black and white portraits and reportage-style images of celebrities from the days of the Soviet Union. And as usual, in my experience of Moscow exhibitions, hundreds of pictures are crammed in (nobody must be left out) with no room to breathe or to separate out the really fine work from the more mediocre.

But overall, very interesting. The work suggests an awareness of the most famous western celebrity photographers such as Avedon, Snowdon and Bailey, but filtered through very different conditions. As Google Translate cutely re-writes the Lumiere Brothers Photography Centre description: “Many of the photographers not only removed the elite, but they themselves belonged to her. How, for example, Vladimir Musaelyan, Brezhnev's personal photographer for thirteen years, or Yuri Krivonosov, thanks to which viewers will see rare shot Arkady Raikin in the studio ... High-class pros, they were outstanding personality, who put their relationship with the stars.” The famous, then, tended to have their own photographers (who were also celebrities), and while there is nothing too outrageous in these photographs, they are often both intimate and lively.

But the strange thing; whilst a 20 year period is covered nothing really changes. Everything has a kind of tentative 1960s look; you keep finding yourself checking the dates on the picture captions and being surprised/confused. Russia always tends to be shorthanded through the figures of Lenin and Stalin; people from other bits of Europe tend to forget the stagnation of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Not only has artistic development here being thwarted by the threats 'cultural intellectuals' have faced, but also by the fact that very little 'happened' creatively in Russia across that 20 years; this whilst much of the rest of Europe and the US was being hit by flower power, feminism, anti-racism, punk, post-modernism etc., etc., etc. For me, this is what I notice most about these photographs, what gives them - as a totality - a strange, almost melancholic, feel.

I went to this show with Phil who is a photographer. See his work here.