In Prayer?

She sat on a bench outside the Greater Church of the Ascension at Nikitskii Gates Square, glasses on the tip of her nose, as her entire face was buried in a prayer book held by the strained tips of her elongated fingers. Frowning heavily, her face had the expression not of mere concentration but of genuine sorrow.

 

Documentary photography of what I call The City presupposes my chosen subjects' complete lack of awareness that they are being targeted.  And I don't feel uncomfortable about that: after all, I am recording urban life--factographically, as 1920s Russian aesthetic theorists would've referred to it--with respect for each subject.

With her, however, I felt that I was infringing on a very private moment even if held in a public space. I suppose full-time photojournalists in war zones get over that sentiment very quickly.

To me, the line of documentation and intrusion now seems blurred.

Birdman

Is it possible to shoot 10 GB of photos and pick a single favorite? 

Yes. 

This is it: 

He really stood out, this Birdman, in Moscow's Vorontsovsky Park, filled with joyous children and their parents' fashionably overdressed lapdogs.

Some would say that he was an urban St. Francis, but a more careful inspection reveals the piercing alienation of a contemporary metropolis embedded in the grooves on his face.

Smoking Man

Watching a rather inane street performer, his lips curled in contempt (or, perhaps, naturally), he maintained an unblinking stare--this smoking man of Arbat.  Of course, his eyes were concealed by his sunglasses and his "Lenin" cap, but, for some reason, I was convinced of it.

And as he watched on, I watched him, admittedly pleased that I could detect his smoke through my viewfinder. Then I took a second to review the existent photos, and pointed the camera back up. 

He was gone. 

Swedish Street Musician

The surest way to get to know a city--any city--in the here-and-now is to sit in a coffee shop and watch people go about their daily life, not visit museums and monuments. (Those serve a different purpose, and are meant to express the essence of a culture at its pinnacle.) 

My best people-watching experiences so far have been in Tokyo and Moscow. The Baltic trip has been the epitome of tourism--organized and guided sightseeing, by and large--so I have had very few opportunities to engage in documentary street photography.

Yet there have been some exceptions too, and this street musician from Stockholm's medieval town is one of my favorites.

 

Arbat: the Good, the Bad, and the Really Expensive

When it comes to Moscow, Old Arbat is a busy tourist "paradise" brimming with kitschy "folk," akin to those in other foreign metropolises. And, as such, it makes many Russians themselves feel discomfort (conscious or otherwise) at the idea of Tradition within a rather wild consumer space.

But it is precisely this quality that makes it an ideal place for photographing strangers, or what I call "the City." After all, there are the slowly walking, sometimes awkward foreigners ready to blow too much money on souvenirs that are not worth it, snooty rich Russians dressed like a single, combined high-end brand advertising heading into Starbucks for their triple macchiato, street artists forced to draw pointless Hollywood celebrities to showcase their technical skills (those of the artists', not the celebrities!), on and on and on.

Certainly,  I post a lot of nature and wildlife imagery, and my commission work often involves conceptual editorial photography. Yet, documentary images of people are one of my favorite subjects to pursue. (When I used to draw regularly, I preferred realistic portraiture, not much different from the aforementioned street artists.)

On a number of recent occasions, it happened to be Kabuki-cho in Shinjuku (Tokyo)--a delightfully trashy area--that provided excellent opportunities for "stalking the City." (Now that I think about it, I've also done the same in Nagoya and Hakodate, sans the "trash.") So when I went to Old Arbat the other day, I felt a bit like a sniper with my telephoto lens targeting certain characters I encountered in the act of, well, being themselves. 

Needless to say, I cannot wait to process the images! In the meantime, here are some mobile shots of Arbat tourism.