I had an entire week for Eid, nine days including weekends at both ends, and so Mutsumi and I hopped a plane to Almaty, the former capital and still largest city of Kazakhstan. Apart from never having been there and an interest in Central Asia, Kazakhstan was a convenient choice as visas are not required for US or Japanese citizens and as there are direct, 4-hour flights from Dubai.
Most of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances seem unfamiliar with the country. Not unlike ourselves. What we found was a lovely green city filled with parks, a space fairly easy to navigate (though more authorized taxis would be helpful), and thanks to Stalin’s paranoia and his habit of using the country as a dumping ground for perceived enemies, an interesting mix of ethnicities and their associated language and food traditions.
Unlike many of my most recent adventures, I was travelling with Mutsumi. For the first 3.5 days I wasn’t able to move as slowly as I might otherwise, to linger and look at subjects from a number of different angles. This appears to be evident in the images produced, with fewer close-ups and more medium-length shots. It doesn’t seem to have affected production. My week-long solo visit to Tbilisi resulted in 1148 images. My Almaty folder shows 964.
On my last day in the city I set out with intention of shooting as many street portraits as possible. Two things conspired against me. One was a lack of energy as a result of a full day of hiking the day before. The other was a growing feeling of discouragement after being turned down by the first half-dozen people I met. Maybe it’s just not my day to shoot people, I thought, and moved on to more familiar items in the landscape: trees, storefronts, architecture, monuments, graffiti.
I set a goal, as with my Tbilisi project, of whittling down the initial edit of 161 images to an even 100. Sequencing was a bit more problematic, but the repeated and numerous images of parks and leafy sidewalks presented a convenient strategy, allowing me to blend themes based on chronology, event, and subject.
The set opens with a shot from the airplane window signalling arrival, and then moves straight into a leafy enclosure. From the trees peaks a church, which we approach and explore, both interior and the surrounding park. We move back through the trees and emerge into a Metro station, where we meet a security guard, whose image segues into a series of portraits, ending with an image of soldiers. This takes us into a memorial day event featuring music, speeches, and a wreath laying. We return to the park once again, emerging to survey some of the buildings before pulling back to a long shot of the surrounding mountains and panoramas from the high peaks. Back in the park we find Lenin presiding over a group of mothers and their babies, leading to a series of group portraits before again returning to the park, where we find a monument. This leads to the monumental architecture of a mosque and church, in which we find a painting of icons, which segues into modern icons of graffiti. This takes us into other examples of art, back to monumental state architecture and then to images of small homes in a quiet residential neighborhood. This small tour ends with a pair of vertical images, segueing into vertical images of state statuary, store fronts, and architecture before finally closing in a park.
In my Tbilisi reflection I note what I perceived as an undo burden to keep up with the processing. I don’t recall feeling with the Almaty photos. Perhaps after six weeks in Japan I have become used to working with this volume of images.
So far feedback on the Almaty album has been extremely positive. I’m still too close to them in time to see them as anything more than something I’d like to be done with for now. Perhaps one will be picked up for The Big Issue North, perhaps one of my last chances as I will soon be an officially ex-OCA student.
Alamaty Outtakes
To the Alamaty 100:
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