As it is often the case with street photography (and my project is essentially a street photography project if you strip it down to the core), you spend hours, days or (heaven forbid) weeks and nothing happens or you just don’t see an image worth being taken…The trick is probably not getting discouraged and accepting these ‘dry’ periods as part of the process… - as difficult as it may be. After all, as Cartier-Bresson put it ’…It is the photo that takes you; one must not take photos.’ In other words, if you try to force it, you take (at best) mediocre but often just plain dreadful pictures…
Yesterday was just such a day, nothing really happened in these underpasses, or I just did not see it, or I was not at the right place at the right moment, or, or… Despite having hung around there for hours and hours... It is very difficult not to get discouraged in these moments. The feeling creeps up that you might have seen it all, that’s it, no more images to take, you have ‘exhausted’ the place, the project maybe…
And just as I wanted to give up for the day, the perfect ‘theatre’ presented itself to me. I saw this old woman begging in front of an entrance and I sensed that this could become an image with meaning if I waited for the right ‘actors’ to appear on stage and give this begging some context. After numerous attempts and at least half an hour working on this situation, I took this picture:
two well-heeled good-looking youngsters in designer clothes hurling by this old and frail beggar. This image represents a lot of what is going on in these underpasses as a metaphor of what is going on in the Ukraine as a whole today. There are the ones benefiting from the double digit GDP growth in the current year, and there are those who might even be worse off than before the Orange Revolution, those who have to beg in their old age and in poor health in these underpasses…
And sometimes it needs a bit of encouragement like this to persuade other images to come and find you… This image, which I took a few hours afterwards combines two pertinent leitmotifs in these underpasses: music and flowers. And again, this underpass underneath Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the main square in Kiev is but a mere metaphor, a microcosm for the Ukraine. Music and flowers have a significant place in the Ukrainian society.
Stylistically I am trying to move away from the reflections and mirror images that I took few weeks ago (I will still keep them and use them for the final edit, I hope) and experiment with longer exposure times and blurring…Looking at Paolo Pellegrin’s work is always inspiring and instructive in this respect. The Magnum website has a preview of Paolo Pellegrin’s excellent new book ‘Double Blind’ which will be published by Trolley soon.
