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Saturday, 03 May 2014

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Absolutely WONDERFUL!
Images #28 and #37 can easily stand comparison with Cartier-Bresson's best.

Norilsk looks like a forbidding place to call home. The people born there have been dealt a very bad hand. Chernyshova's shooting and editing tells their story well. I'm reminded just how lucky I am. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Now that was an excellent photo essay. Great photographs, clear and interesting captions, and it's well presented visually on the computer(no pop-up captions that I hate). Plus I don't recall seeing Lens Culture before, so thanks for that.

One of the perpetual ironies endemic to photography- such beautiful photographs from such stark surroundings.

The people in east Ukraine who are so desperate to join Russia, might want to take a look at these. I know it's a very different place geographically, but this does point to how the central government addresses regional needs.

Re: Peter Write (The people in east Ukraine who are so desperate to join Russia, might want to take a look at these.)

Norilsk was built by the central government. It's the biggest producer of Nickel, which is exported to many countries, including the USA.

Some folks give advice to other countries while having no clue what they are talking about. (Most Russians and Ukrainians know Norilsk quite well. It's where a lot of them travel to work. Good wages make it easy to recruit.)

Norilsk is an example of privatization. All its infrastructure is inherited from the former Soviet Union, when it was flourishing. The current owners which include western investors are only interested in profits. Unless the government steps in, they won't spend any money on housing, transportation, clean air, etc.

Really interesting location and very strong images. Really strong.

There are some webcams of Norilsk at http://www.norcom.ru/webcams

Wow, thanks for Lens Culture. Check out Tatsuo Suzuki's Tokyo Street People set, some stark imagery of Tokyo's underbelly.

It is quite rare to encounter such a well-rounded and thoroughly edited piece of work these days. Easily Magnum caliber.

Excellent choice to highlight, Mike.

I invite folks to take particular note of how Elena skillfully uses her color images' resources, especially shade tones and highlight levels, to reinforce the impression she wants the images to make. Her series is a strong example of the tremendous narrative power of color when used strategically and, most importantly, judiciously.

@Kenneth: " especially shade tones and highlight levels"

Interesting comment ... can you pls expand on these concepts?

@ Sven W: Color photography offers a tremendously rich visual vocabulary. Message in color images can be conveyed not just by a frame's contents and arrangement but also by the image's palette and the relationships of hues. Consider, for example, what the cool hues of many of Elena's shade tones convey almost subliminally. Also how the slightly over-heated/under-detailed highlights help to convey a bone-chilling and spirit-chilling environment. Even the sick-bed portrait in frame 13 conveys this loudly and clearly.

Chroma and hue are color photography's analogs to written language's adjectives and adverbs. Just as reading a well-written story is a treat to the mind, looking at well-constructed color photographs that skillfully employ all the tools of the medium is a delight to the eye even if the viewer can't identify all of the language elements. Elena's essay was a delight to view because it uses much of color photography's full vocabulary, not just the usual "awesome" and "great" that we normally see online, to get viewers' emotional and memetic involvement.

BTW, studying good color photography is yet another excellent reason to see such works printed and hung on a wall. Books can be a reasonable stand-in for the experience, given graphic arts' tremendous strides in recent years. But the exhibition print is where a color photograph's fullest expression is presented.

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