"Why the 'Masses' are called 'Masses'"

This outpouring of people begins every day in mid afternoon and does

not cease until about 7:00 p.m. or so, as the masses move in a country

city where there is 'mass transit' unlike in many Western countries and

cities -- and one of the most efficient 'mass transits' in the world,

modeled (copied actually) after THE most efficient mass transit system

in the world (Moscow). Your ratings and critiques are invited and most

welcome. If you rate harshly, very critically, or just wish to post an

observation, please submit a helpful and constructive comment; please

share your photographic knowledge to help improve my photography.

Thanks! Enjoy! John

Did you spot Waldo yet?

 

John (Crosley)

 

;~))

 

 

not much to say except thar standing their in fron must be quite special feeling. Very strong story in this photographe.

 

Thanks for sharing

This is one of those photos that must NOT be viewed and evaluated in thumbnail to understand it.

 

You have put your finger on why I took it and posted it.

 

It was an overwhelming feeling. I stood there and took a number of such photos, protected only by a natural diversion in the crowd and the fact I was using a zoom telephoto to compress the crowd, and focusing on the middle proletariat and relying on some minimal depth of field to bring some of the rest into agreeable focus. This is a shot that can only be taken with high ISO to be sharp, if one wants any smaller aperture for depth of field, as I thought was proper.

 

I keep finding and taking 'new' photos, don't I?

 

Thanks for a most understanding comment

 

John (Crosley)

Very impressive work. I believe this is an example of the sea of people you were mentioning in one of earlier comments under Loneliness in Public photo. Congratulations on this great work and thanks for sharing.

This is indeed the 'Sea of People' referred to.

 

I was very impressed by it; being mostly a person who shuns crowds.

 

This was the same 'sea of people' who passed that 'lonely' woman by. Waiting for a break in this crowd - early and farther behind -- was a huge task -- as it obviously seems unending. And for the photographer it apparently was -- and entailed a VERY long wait.

 

Thanks for the kind comment. I appreciate your attention to my work.

 

John (Crosley)

Excellent shot!

Thanks.

 

I was a bit overwhelmed.

 

I had not known so many people passed this spot daily.

 

Yes. Daily between certain hours, like when a dam bursts.

 

I could go back any day and retake this photo I think, and get variations.

 

If I didn't get run over first.

 

You gotta be careful out there.

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

This large mass of people always causes in me a painful feeling of the solitude

Do you feel like this woman felt?

 

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=10325911

 

(sorry it didn't embed, youll have to cut and paste into your browser)

 

At the moment I took this photograph, I am sure she still was up top the hill and down the back side, at the side probably with the same crowd in front of her. I photographed her without a break in the crowd, but remarked then that it hardly mattered, she would have been as lonely with a great river of people as had passed for a great long time - as I had witnessed and waited to break so I could get my photograph.

 

I needed the space to get the photograph only, as the people were not transparent.

 

Otherwise the photo would have been the same, I'm sure from what I saw through glimpses of her through breaks in the crowd. I was patient and patience paid off.

 

Patience sometimes pays off (and my ski parka got white from leaning against the opposing wall,as vendors nearby shouted warnings to me - cheap, cheap paint on the walls - what Americans would call 'whitewash' (sometimes also that politicians do when caught cheating).

 

(American politicians as I do not comment on Ukrainian politics - I photograph 'people' and stay away from political ideas. I have no ;political agenda here or anywhere, much as Cartier-Bresson did not espouse causes, in lieu of his great photography (my goals of course are in line with my more modest talent. ;~)))

 

I am sure you know where this is and if not, please write me.

 

Thanks for an always interesting comment -- interesting in part to me because as a resident of Kyiv, if I can make photographs of it appealing to you who know it well, then I may be succeeding in my goal - to capture its life and its citizens' lives as they go about their business.

 

John (Crosley)

I very regret my poor English and I use translator http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ - translation is obtained a little strange, but I understood that you wanted to say. Successes!

 

Svetlana.

Beautiful shot!It seems a scene of a science fiction movie!The foreground persons seem phantoms or aliens and the background people follow them!Best regards and compliments..

Bis problem.

 

I very much hope to please you (as a Kyiv resident) with my view of your city, maybe to open your eyes, to my (a stranger's) way of seeing things.

 

If any time you wish to send me a message, my e-mail is available to members or alternatively on my biography page (you have to make a change to it a little, but I think you can understand). I needn't be a stranger if you wish to communicate -- I welcome friends from all sources, (even if I am a guy who looks like a fat old dedushka!!!

 

;~))

 

(I think a lot younger, as you can see)

 

John (Crosley)

I used to read a lot of science fiction, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Isaac Asimov, among others, and of course, truth, it seems, is greater than fiction.

 

The tabloids (newspapers folded and cut tabloid style) tell us that Hubbard died surrounded by (anti-)psychotic drugs, even though he disclaimed psychosis as a sort of illness of the mind that apparently didn't exist and psychologists as 'shams' or some such.

 

We see giant movie stars (the Tom Cruises and John Travoltas) have long espoused the ethos/religion called Scientology, which the German government long tried to have banned as a fraud. (who won, can you tell me?)

 

Truth is stranger even than science fiction . . . .

 

(Cruise was a former neighbor whom I never saw, never photographed, never wanted to see or photograph, and if I saw him and had a camera in hand would never have raised it to photograph him, as I don't photograph celebrities. Travolta then was a visitor, and his limo driver tried to tip me off to Travolta's comings and goings, and I said 'thanks' but 'no thanks' - they deserve their peace.)

 

They deserve their privacy - unless they seek publicity -- or they do something outrageous or just photographically interesting as ordinary citizens and not as celebrities when I'm photographing, as I am NOT INTERESTED IN PHOTOGRAPHING CELEBRITIES. I want people to see my photographs for the scenes and faces of the non-famous people in them (not the famous ones).

 

AND I am not interested in promoting or disregarding religions or pseudo-religions or ethics either, no matter how unusual or interesting the claims against them are made.

 

Think how interesting the claims that could be made against the Christians if they surfaced today as a 'sect'.

 

''They bury their executed leader, and on the third day he supposedly disappeared and went up to join 'God' but then he was "God' or was that he was GOD'; and what is this mystery about the 'HOLY TRINITY' anyway, it seems indecipherable. Let's throw some anti-psychotic pills at those Christians.'

 

Well, whether this scene is from 'The Day of the Triffids' or one of those great concentric conveyor belts that got progressively faster and faster as one went toward the fastest, so people could stand and move great distances without autos, that Asimov wrote about, this scene, as you wrote, could indeed be from 'science fiction'

 

Indeed, when makers of 'commercials (elsewhere known as 'reclamen') make their wares for distribution on television or video, they use computers to make the thousands of bodies and faces necessary -- but not here -- they're all people.

 

Each one is an individual.

 

Stalin and early Communist leaders designed Moscow with wide boulevards and tall buildings (though no cars on those boulevards - till more recently when Communism had fallen) in order to denigrate the individual and to glorify the STATE -- to cause the common man to understand he had lost his individuality and was a cypher for the COMMUNIST STATE.

 

Not so much, however, in Kyiv, the next door neighbor and a key part of the Soviet Union, I think, as the Soviets wanted to populate Ukraine with Russians (leading to what Ukrainians call a Holocaust, but Russians call a regional famine that affected them too). But that's political and I don't DO politics here. In any case, the Ukrainians are a little more friendly and courteous than the Russians, in my experience . . . . and I've live both places (and well, in both).

 

I do photograph the masses, as here.

 

These are the people formerly known as the proletariat whom the Soviet State formerly made plans for and did plan a central economy for. Individuality was swallowed; individual decisions were subsumed by an 'all-knowing central state that supposedly took away individual decision making' It was all centrally planned and as a consequence many men (and women too) had big trouble with decision making in the Capitalism that followed, as they were used to taking orders and filling plans (such as five-year plans) that stifle innovation.

 

The innovators became wealthy,sometimes fabulously so, and the working men often suffered, sometimes worse.

 

I did not know it until much later, but he Soviets were a big buyer of Dior gowns, but far be it from the common Soviet housewife to see a Dior gown. If you were a general's wife or an Admiral's wife, it was entirely possible, though (or so I am told).

 

In the land where everybody was 'equal' there was primus inter pares (first among equals), which is a contradiction in terms.

 

Ukrainians know they are having freedom, and most seem to enjoy it as did the Russians when I was there, but the Russians experienced rampant gangsterism as well, and that was a violation of civic order (which Putin and now Medvedev mostly have stopped).

 

In Russia there would be demonstrations for the Communist Party to revive the Soviet Union and even two elections ago a little also in Ukraine for the Communists, but it was an afterthought, though less than in Russia I think, even though Putin/Medvedev have consolidated ALL the power there.

 

But God help it if the proletariat (above) really gets mad. (former Proletariat as the proletariat is a Communist construct and with Communism having fallen, there is no more proletariat.)

 

These are the people you don't want to piss off too much.

 

The men are strong and able.

 

And sturdy.

 

Tough as nails in most instances.

 

If I were a politician, I would want this photo above my desk (not behind me) but above all the visitor -- where they couldn't see, but I could.

 

As a reminder.

 

Against taking too much for granted.

 

I wouldn't want to push these people too far.

 

They've tasted freedom and the fruits of capitalism.

 

They're still skeptical, but most have aspirations.

 

Increasingly, I think, they will be demanding.

 

But, who knows, we'll see. . . . .

 

Giuseppe, I'm just a disinterested observer . . . my photos (like Cartier-Bresson said) do not espouse a political cause at all - they just capture the moment if they 'stand for something' as Iranian student sought to do a while ago with my 'protest' photos, I tell them 'no' that's not what I do -- make propaganda photos - I just don't do that.

 

I make photos.

 

Propaganda is for other people.

 

I search for truth in individual behavior - out of that may come some insights . . . . personally and for my viewers.

 

The masses will decide what they want without input by me.

 

I'm just a (keen) observer.

 

John (Crosley)

Well this happened to me just a week ago. Not realizing where I was but sudddenly caught in an underground tunnel exiting the "Dome of the Rock Mosque" on Friday no less at let out time. I was pushed shoved squeezed and had to go with the flow. Of course I did not hold my camera up and photograph anything as in your photo, -that is for sure!

I am surprised to find another tunnel with so many people going in one direction rather than two, all at once and in such a crush; they must rare in the world, but thius one here is massive. Look at how wide it is and still it's competely full side to side and front to back, compressed by a 200 mm lens on an APS-C sensor camera for film equivalent of 300 mm.

 

I was able to effectively stop motion somewhat despite stopping down and still get some appearnce oif sharpness in the middle ground by focusing in middle ground, using hyperfocal distance, stopping down maximally, all because of so little side to side movement (as opposed to up and down) movement of the people coming directly my way.

 

In other words, they had no or little sideways movement, and some little up down movement as my shutter was open, so even though they were moving and I was shooting full extension 200 mm telephoto on APX-C sensor the effect is much more sharpness than one might expect because they are moving straight toward the camera.

 

Of course not all are 'sharp' and most are not 'sharp' at all, but you get the point.

 

It must have been exhilarating to feel part of life to get bumped around like that, a Jew at a Mosque on Friday -- are you living dangerously? Or is that normal for your city?

 

Oh Vey!

 

John (Crosley)

No, it was not exciting; it was a foolish accident

I wasn't suggesting it was an episode of flottism, or anything like that, but the crush of a crowd can cause the adrenaline to rise and give a person a 'rush' which is not always entirely unwanted, even if unexpected or if one rationally considers one's self 'foolish' for getting into such a situation in the first place . . . .

 

That was the sense in which I made my suggestion; no more.

 

Also, of course, there are studies about the 'subconscious mind' which suggest that many so-called 'foolish accidents' are quite 'on purpose'???

 

I am not saying it's true in every case, or even in all, but some times, . . . . .

 

But that's for you to mull over privately and not necessarily on a public forum.

 

It seems like you probably are not the type to have shied away from an encounter or a little skirmish, at least intellectually, so I am not too surprised to hear of your little story , . . . as it is in keeping with my 'own mind's eye' or 'picture' of your innate character . . . . .however wrong you may consider that to be.

 

John (Crosley)