Crimean Cossacks

I've been photographing Crimean Cossacks often and on this month. Their origin is Russian Cossacks - mostly Don and Kuban Cossacks. During the Soviet era, Cossacks' tradition was somewhat suppressed, but since the collapse, the Cossacks are reviving their tradition. Crimean Cossacks are Russian supporters and generally don't have very good relationships with Crimean Tatars because of the complicated historical territorial issues although the aggression between Tatars and Russians have calmed down in the past years. Well, it's in Ukraine, but Crimea has a large number of ethnic Russians, and that makes stuff complicated especially foreigners like me. Anyway, I'm more interested in the way they live and the efforts to reserve and revive their century-long old tradition and their main role as military communities than politics.


Morning before the start of the parade for the victory day. Cossacks started participating with traditional style a few years ago.


Cross and the tower are installed near Yalta a few years ago. Cross and the tower used to be seen in every Cossack community.


Kuban Cossack's uniform with a sabre.


The victory day parade in Northern Crimea.


Young Cossack boy.



The only Cossack cadet school in Crimea and Ukraine.


Cossack tent. They used to travel with horses and stay in the tent in the Wild Field.


Just dancing after the Victory Day parade. Not Cossack dance... Also, the film screwed.


More photos.

Narcoman Portraits 2

I've been re-visitng some drug addicts I shot before and their acquaintance. Since I realized that it's almost impossible to follow them around without taking a lot of risk, I'm redoing drug addicts' project with portraits.

More Portraits

Since I came back to Ukraine, I've been working on portraits while preparing for a trip in Tajikistan. I still shoot drug addicts in the town, but I kind of feel stuck on this these days. It's pretty hard to follow around them. I haven't published this story, but this type of story doesn't sell... Well, if it's not gonna be published, what's the point? I mean I really think drug addiction is a serious problem here. I heard one third of youngsters here have tried drug harder than marijuana. Anyway, I still like shoot them, so I continue it while I'm here. I also started shooting portraits of them. I don't know if color would give me a better chance for publication, but it might...

Laptop&Mamiya

Part of the reason I went to New York was to receive a used Mac Pro as a bonus and buy a used Mamiya 6. I'm pretty happy about them so far except that I had to ship back a broken Mamiya lens for exchange . It's a pretty sharp lens.
This is the test shot while Jake is setting up his mac pro for me, kindly coming all the way to New York to give me a laptop.

No Picture For A While

I've been quite lazy on updating the blog. Went to London, New York and Warsaw for various businesses... I'm shooting more with film, so it will take some time to post new pictures...

Memory of Donetsk

I moved to Dniprodzerzhynsk some months ago. Before that, I lived in Donetsk for two months, translating, learning Russian and drinking alone. I couldn't find much over there to shoot and shot Lenin's statue just like every tourist. I realize later that every former Soviet union city and town has a Lenin statue... Ukrainian landscape is pretty similar everywhere in the east part, to say the least.