A few weeks ago, Marina, Nyusha, and I have spent a day in Montreal. Here’s a shot I grabbed as we were walking around with no particular goal in mind. I used to spend quite a bit of time in Montreal back in the day. This trip brought back memories.

A quick portrait I grabbed of my nephew, Max, when we were eating lunch in a little restaurant in Newton Centre, not far from where I’ve spent my formative years in the US. I came to Newton from Moscow a shell-shocked 11-year-old back in ’91. By ’97 I had gone through a small chunk of elementary school, all of middle school, and somehow managed to graduate from Newton South high school. I left to California in ’02 and haven’t lived there since.

There’s something, for lack of better word, special in the eyes of little children. They haven’t build up layers upon layers of the kinds of smoke-and-mirrors and defense mechanisms that we all assemble around ourselves as we get older and, generally, not any wiser.

I really love this picture.

Hi, it’s been a while.

This is going to be the first photo I post from our New Zealand honeymoon. They are not in a chronological order – I did a good job labeling the first couple rolls of film and then, unsurprisingly for those who know me well, let it go. Now, I’m going through the rolls, developing them one-by-one and will be posting the photos as they come. This one was taken in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand. We were staying at a gorgeous government-building-to-hotel conversion and the second we walked into our loft-suite and looked up I saw this shot. It turned out to be hard to get though – our wireless flash trigger has given up on life by that point, and the ambient light was all wrong. What we wound up doing is setting the camera up on the tripod, posing marina as I looked through the viewfinder, then walking over to the light stand right next to her, on another floor, using a looooong shutter release cable that we happened to take along with us for self-portraits to trip the shutter for something like 1 second and then manually flashing the flash. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I like what I got out of it.

I have to say that sometimes it’s pretty useful to clean the house. The other day I found roll of the film hiding from me in the pantry, developed it and found this great photo on it. I took it almost a year ago at Death Valley.

For no particular reason, whenever I look at this photo I think about “Tomorrow’s Child” short story by Ray Bradbury.

I was going through my old photos and found this one. Last Thanksgiving we went on a road trip to Portland and drove by this beautiful town on the border of California and Oregon. We stopped there to get breakfast and I’ve noticed this abandoned café.
Anyway, here is another Amichai’s poem, hmm it looks like I’m really obsessed with his poetry.
 

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

Another shot from Death Valley that made me think back to the martian landscapes in total recall. That place really does make you think that there’s gotta be at least a couple of ancient alien artifacts burried underneath all the formations.

Death Valley blew my mind. I was, in a way, expecting it to, but I guess you can never be truly prepared to have their mind blown even if you do know it’s coming. Sadly, I was not quite able to capture much of it on camera. Maybe next time.

The interesting thing is that the photograph that describes how it felt to me best is not a shot of the dunes or of the sand-hills, of which I took a few and will likely post here in a while, but a portrait of Marina. The more I do this the more I come to realize that it’s people that make photographs for me.

This was a four-person effort – Marina was posing, I was shooting, and two of our friends who went on this road trip with us were holding a reflector and a piece of tumble-weed to make the shadows really work.

To me, this photo justifies the 4 rolls of film that I shot and that barely have anything usable on them. I know that I will be coming back to this one later on in my life. It’s a memory that I now know will not slip away. This is why I do this.

Alex has finally convinced me to start posting my photos in this blog, so here is the first one, it was taken couple weeks ago in Death Valley.