International Women's Day

Today was one of the big holidays in Ukraine, paying tribute to the amazing women of this country. I walked to my Russian lessons and was surprised to find that not only was this important, but it also was a vacation day across the country--nobody was out at 9 a.m. as I strolled up Pushkinskaya St. toward my classes. Usually, the metro and buses are crowded with people heading to work.

Ukraine remains very traditional in many ways, particularly in the patriarchal nature of family relationships. Men should provide the money; women do everything else. They cook and clean and work and take care of the kids, all while trying to look as impressive as they can. But they are not saints. They have learned how to wrest control in many ways, despite this traditional culture, with cunning and often not-too-subtle manipulation. They take boyfriends; they are very demanding; they know their stunning looks and provocative clothing have an impact. I don't wish to judge; the easiest way to fail in understanding a culture is to spend too much time applying our values on their culture. I will first try harder to understand. It is interesting, for sure, and disturbing in many ways.

A friend told me this joke, which has some truth to it:

A man watches his neighbor sit on his balcony every day, strumming his guitar and drinking vodka. In the morning, his wife brings him breakfast, prepares the kids for school, and heads off to work. The neighbor spends the morning playing guitar. At lunchtime, his wife returns home to fix him lunch and clean up after him. And at night, the man sits on his balcony playing the guitar until dinner is served, by his wife, and he goes to bed.

The man watches his neighbor do this for several days. One day, he leans over and asks, "Don't you feel guilty?"

"About what?" the neighbor replies, still playing his guitar.

"You let your wife cook and clean and take care of the kids and work, and the only thing you do all day is to play guitar."

"Ah," said the neighbor. "No, I don't feel guilty. Is it my fault she can't play the guitar?"

So on March 8, the men cook and clean and buy their wives and girlfriends flowers, purses, shoes, phones and the like. Everywhere, I saw men and women with huge bundles of flowers of all sorts. The women seem to love this day. I think I understand why. For once, their many jobs become only one.

Tidbits

Where does all the dirt come from? I am wandering around the city on a daily basis and noticing all the dirt that covers the streets and sidewalks. The remaining spring ice is so covered in dirt that I can't tell the difference between ice and schmuck.

The sole English speaker...at the Adidas store today, where I bought a new pair of shoes, didn't actually make shopping easier, but it sure made me feel more welcome that somebody (a clerk who spent two years studying English in London) would bother to speak to me in English.

Loneliness is easier to accept when you blame it on the barrier of language.

XXL in Ukraine is barely large enough to cover my personal obesity....my friends here want me to wear tighter clothing even though such tightens would be ridiculed in the USA. We try to hide any indication of the beer/vodka gut, but in Ukraine, they seem to accept it and not to mind.

Why do clerks in every store give you a receipt only after they rip it slightly?

The Russian language has a whole other layer of complexity that I haven't even begun to delve into....the next month of language study will be freakin' difficult!!!

New shoes make me happy, especially when they keep my feet from hurting so much.

This American Life is truly the most interesting podcast/PBS program ever...I've listened to three in a row and it makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile...

Be well!

srd

Just What is Mine? And Yours?

In America, the concept of personal property is well established, really a fundamental belief system in the system. It extends to intellectual property as well, although this belief continues to be eroded by pervasive piracy, plagiarism and perhaps the moral corruption of American citizens.

But in Ukraine, the legacy of Communism means that the idea of personal ownership of property is vague at best, nonexistent at worst. I did a photoshoot last week for a friend of a friend. She needed some professional photographs for a new job, so I offered to shoot them for her, gratis. I told her up front that I would allow her to select 10 images that I would edit and deliver to her in both small and large resolution formats, for web use and for printing.

After the shoot, she was quite excited about how they turned out (I'm a fair photographer with 20 years of experience doing this as both an amateur and pro in America). She selected about a dozen images, and I even edited several more because I wasn't so busy and thought it would be nice.

But when she arrived to pick them up, she got upset with me that I wouldn't give her all 350 images (the unedited images that I didn't think were of sufficient quality to let other people see). I tried to explain to her that shooting hundreds of images was part of a process to produce the best ones for her use. She had no need for all of them for the job; she just wanted to print a bunch more up to show her family. I have never given out unedited images to my models; it's bad advertising for me, and really useless for any of the semi-pro and professional models I typically work with, anyway. Nobody actually ever asks in the USA.

I ended up giving her the 17 images, plus low-res photos of the rest for her own use on the computer, just to make her happy. But that wasn't enough. She wanted them all, in full resolution, so she could print them up and do who knows what with. I wouldn't go further than that, and even what I did was really a violation of my principles regarding having my work out in the world. But she wasn't happy at all, and she couldn't understand why I wouldn't give them all to her, or even why I had the right to deny her.

And from some perspectives, I understand. If you live in a country without intellectual property rights, then it is hard to argue that my time, experience, equipment, and talent give me the right to control the photos. After all, they are photos of her. But it sure makes me wary about doing trades of any sort in this country. Why use my $60,000 of equipment, 25 years of experience, and whatever "talent" I have just to see my worst photos out there in the world?

Lesson learned.

A Taste of America

The mournful guitar of Mark Knoffler echoed in the marble hall as I strolled among the bundled up patrons and fake trees of the Caravan shopping center. It almost felt like home...McDonalds in the food court, plenty of jewelry shops, overpriced shops like Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Adidas, and teenagers laughing and generally screwing around (two young guys sat in the food court connecting about 30 straws into one long pipe for no apparent reason).

Today I finally tackled the metro, heading up six stops from my local station to two mega malls, at least they seem that way in Ukraine, on the north side of town. I needed clothes--three t-shirts, three button-downs, and a couple of sweaters don't really cover the needs of a modern American man--and I was trying to find the last pieces of the XBox puzzle so that I could play online with my son. I succeeded on both counts, finding several shirts, sweaters, and t-shirts at discount prices while also managing to spend way too much money on a wireless connector for my new XBox.

And it felt good to realize that Ukraine does offer frozen pizzas, more than one kind of white-ish cheese (although no cheddar, nor any kind of nacho chip), and even has a pseudo-Apple store (although without the headphones I am desperately missing, after losing mine sometime within the first few days of my arrival).

But it wasn't all familiar. Each mall was anchored by a super-Wal-Mart sort of grocery store, and while the aisles were huge, the selection sometimes baffled me. Here's a photo of one of the complete aisles dedicated to vodka!

But much of it felt very comfortable, like the esclators and marble and fountains.

I'll be back, I'm sure, if only to feel modestly like I am not in a completely foreign world.

Small Victory

Can I just tell everyone how accomplished I feel at this moment? I have been trying for weeks to set up a wireless network at home, and tonight, after six hours of fiddling with the settings, I have actually managed to make my internet connection work wirelessly. Woo Hoo!

This may seem like a small victory (because it is), but I still feel like a king tonight. I can connect to the internet on my computer as well as my iPhone....which means that soon I ought to be able to hook up an Xbox and my remote backup to the network as well. Good times....

Watch for Falling Daggers!

Today I was walking with some friends and they pulled me away from a building, pointed up and warned me about falling ice. After a big snow and some warmer weather, the icicles are huge and sometimes break free, falling three or four stories to the sidewalk. I've seen some monsters on the sidewalk already. And then I read this:

Woman Hit by Icicle

As if the slippery sidwalks weren't enough of a hazard.....but I prefer these risks to the kind of litigious society that requires warnings on coffee that it is very hot :)

Morning Snow

The snow had been falling softly all night. At one a.m., I looked out my window to se the most beautiful kind of winter wonders under the dim streetlights--dark, veiny trees with a coat of pure white, formerly dirty sidewalks seemingly washed soft and clean in a blanket of new snow, snow piling up softly on the smallest of surfaces.

So when I awoke near dawn, I knew I had to rise. The streets were nearly deserted as I trudged into the six-inch powder. A few early risers walked in the center of the street. Now and then, a taxi or truck would grumble down Pushkinskaya. It was still snowing hard, and the light was a diffuse blue. I started shooting. 

For two hours I watched the city wake. First came the shovelers (my experience with the sidewalks suggested there were none, but I was wrong!). Old men and women with dark clothes and homemade shovels scooped the sidewalks clear. I wandered downtown, wondering what the bustling center looked and sounded like when snow quieted the city. 

After about an hour, even the unshoveled parts of the main paths were carved by foot traffic, long lines of people bundled against the elements, all seemingly headed to the same two or three buildings for work. The bus terminals had lines of nearly 100 for some routes. No one seemed to speak. 

I have been shooting ditigal for eight years, and in that time I have noticed my eye has transformed into one that only paid attention to light and shadow and form has also begun to see color. For 20 years, I shot exclusively Tri-X in my M4-P's and M6's, but now, shooting with a digital M8, and after several years with other digital cameras, I notice color as much as I notice anything else. So even on a day like today, where the city was practically painted in black and white, I still found that converting my images to monochrome was disappointing. 

But I perservered and ended up with what I think are nine images that are fairly strong in B&W (some even better than the color versions). So here they are. A color gallery might be forthcoming....stay tuned. And then you can decide for yourself if I can see better in color, black and white, or not at all.

 Kharkov Snow