The mad scientist and other stories...

Yesterday I roamed the underpasses for the first time with a fixer… I was in two minds originally hiring a fixer because in the first place I wanted to document unposed and spontaneous life rather than formal portraits of the people down there. I was also afraid that hiring a fixer would radically change the interaction with the ‘residents’ of the underpasses, which so far due to my lack of Ukrainian or Russian language skills had to rely on non-verbal signals. And, admittedly, I also feel more comfortable working on my own when I can decide spontaneously to change the scene or hang around at a particular place for hours without having to feel ‘responsible’ for someone else hanging around with me (I know these fixers get paid just to do that but subconsciously I don’t like having someone waiting for me)…

Now that I feel that I have already a decent body of work on this project on the ‘spontaneous’ part, I have decided to go with a fixer on a few selected days (I will still rely on just my own for the other days)…

First we went back to the place (Lybids’ka) where I had the stiffest resistance from people being photographed and where my ‘closed door’ is (remember the post with the ante room that I wanted to photograph but in the end did not get permission? cf. blog entry of July 14th). To kill the suspense: he did not manage to open this door for me – at least not yesterday. This fixer is pretty good and persistent (and very good at making friends with people by chatting about all kinds of things) but even he could not persuade the owners of the anteroom to let us in… We will try again…

After I had photographed this woman selling kittens (for about 3 Euros a piece),…



…we came across a middle-aged man selling glue and loupes (I know a strange combination but he was selling nothing else). I wanted to take his portrait but he refused… My fixer talked to him for about 30 minutes but was not able to sway him. But he was pretty candid about why he refused to have his image taken: he said that his father fought in World War II and that he was so proud of his father, and that he feels like such a loser having to sell glue and loupes all day down there in these underpasses and having achieved nothing else in his life… Obviously I felt sorry for him but have the deepest respect for his opinion…

Later on, back at Maidan, we came across this ‘mad’ scientist who claimed that he had invented a new ‘power source’ relying on gravitation and therefore making it one of the most renewable and ecologically friendly sources of energy. But he said that Ukrainian authorities had no interest in promoting his idea that’s why he is stuck in these underpasses advising people on their biophysics levels for a few grivnas - just out of interest for his methods I had him do a reading of my energy levels... but that is a different story for another time…