'Life's Hard, Then You Die' Kyiv Ukraine Central Train Station (area)

The steps on this staircase are steep and in rain and snow are icy and

slick; they're not only steep but there's apparently no way for the

physically disabled to get from the train tracks at the lower level to the

plaza and huge main train station at the upper level at top . . . and so it

goes . . . life's hard, then you die . . . in the former Soviet Union . . . . in

an unnamed country. Your ratings, critiques and observations for photo

are invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly, very critically or wish

to make a remark, please submit a helpful and constructive comment;

please share your photographic knowledge to help improve my

photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

The wide angle lens makes a lot here, John!

Best regards

PDE

Thank you Pierre D., this is one of my favorites from wintry times and also regardless of season one of my very BEST no matter what lens.

You are right about the wide angle lens; there's no cropping here at all, and every single bit of space is filled to the brim with information in a photo that has depth, character and texture as well as a huge range of tonalities, and finally 'tells a story' about 'life's travails' (going up the steep steps dragging carts of who knows what, but they must be heavy, and therefore a big burden, Like life itself, sometimes.

The older women, right, Olga by name, by her age, has achieved some freedom from such travails, as she's not expected to be productive.

For most older Ukrainian women (the men don't usually live nearly so long at the women), their generous Soviet guarantees including life pensions have been continued, but so eaten away by bank failures, rising costs of essentials and 'inflation' and 'devaluations' that those 'generous pensions' they worked their entire lives for, have virtually evaporated, and it's not uncommon for a pensioner to commandeer a visitor and display their pension book which might show a monthly pension of just over $100 (raised slightly recently, but undercut by rising inflation and somewhat slowly devaluing currency, surprising since this country is one of the world's richest in agricultural and industrial mineral reserves (but not petroleum).

Why show a stranger a pension book?

To ask the rhetorical question -- what have I worked for all my life, to have the system that promised me a wonderful retirement free from want be a chimera that disappeared one Christmas, to be replaced by a jury-rigged system that had to learn Capitalism on the run, and of course made many mistakes as could be expected.

Problem (and source of the rhetorical question being posed sometimes to strangers with the pension book as 'proof' is 'How can I survive on so little money?'

And of course, people cannot.

So many have turned to selling, with bazaars everywhere, and old people engaged in commerce (or sometimes begging) in many well-trafficked areas, whereas in the more prosperous West, those old people are shunted off into their houses, locked behind doors, or put in 'old folks homes' which so far as I can tell are virtually nonexistent in Ukraine for relatively healthy old folks -- they're out on the street -- usually selling something, if they're trying to survive on their pension.

Change takes time; their government is talking Alliance with the Europeans instead of Russia despite Russia's threats, and it will be interesting to see what happens (I visit sometimes and don't take sides.)

john

John (Crosley)

If I had to use one word to describe this photo, I'd use the word 'rich' in the sense that it is 'rich' with meaningful detail, almost like no other photo I've taken.

Like I said above, I count it among my best -- from a cinematic standpoint, the high point of view suggests 'universality' as opposed to a low point of view which suggests 'specifics' as in a 'specific story' about 'specific people' but this is more an 'allegory' about 'life in this county and other countries like it.'

There is single vanishing point perspective clearly distinguishable, and it is 'rich' on more than one plane, from foreground to background -- something for the eye to roam about and ponder if one has not viewed such a scene before.

Moreover the women are arranged in an 'arc' which is similar to a 'C' curve, which draws the viewer's eye into the photo and down the stairs.  It's not perfect, nor is it an 'S' (or backward 'S' curve) which are even more desirable, but I feel it serves its purpose well.

And the right foreground woman's face adds mystery -- what is she thinking(?) -- why that look? 

I have another of her looking sideways at the camera which is quite good, but the women in the background are not quite so well arranged . . . . and I had a choice to make since I don't copy and paste 'heads' from one photo to another, as one professional photographer I lived with for a while did.

 When she did a group portrait assignment for a company, and the president or CEO looked terrible in the final photo shoot but great in preliminary or other photo shoots or shots, she just cut and pasted his head into the final photo -- a very, very long process, since the 'transplanted head' had to have lighting 'just so' and be sized 'just so' to match the other heads in the group his transplanted head was joining without triggering visual and mental alarms that 'this head was moved from one photo to the next!'

It was a process I don't think I'll ever be involved in -- I don't work for pay, and it's not my ethic.  When you get paid, you get paid by result, not by how strong your ethic is. 

Cartier-Bresson could afford his strong ethic such as 'no cropping, keeping tonalities in their original (these ethos were not kept at all times, however, as I have seen his photos cropped, many more than just the two that were acknowledged). 

Just to go a Cartier-Bresson book of photos and view the aspect ratio (ratio of height to length (or vice versa)) and see if they perfectly match the 2:3 aspect ratio of the Leica or any other 35 mm camera for those photos reputed to have been taken by him with his Leica.  Certain photos are elongated to some degree, indicating some level of cropping, for a man famous for requiring reproduction of sprocket holes in photos taken where he misloaded the film so the sprockets did not engage properly on the takeup spool!  In other words, he talked big, but even he with his strong 'ethos' was a bit of a hypocrite.

His family long was known to be one of the 200 most wealthy families in all of France, and he was at first destined to lead the Cartier-Bresson thread company (as in sewing), to its new prosperity, but he never gave it serious thought, and made sure by his antics he was passed over and never became a businessman or was really involved in that famous French company.

He could afford to have ethics or espouse an ethos. 

Photographers less fortunate financially, could not meet the people he met, hang around famous Parisian cafes, indulge in making photographs when the money could not finance his lifestyle and otherwise indulge his life and his whims.

This is not to say he was a pansy; he was taken prisoner several times by the Nazis, lived in a Stalag, [German POW camp], escaped three times at least, ended the war working underground for the French Resistance, then joined the Allied Forces as a documentarian of the overthrow of the Nazis, finally documenting on kino the repatriation of the prisoners of war in their exodus to their motherlands.

This is a fortunate photo -- it makes use of the entire frame as a whole and makes use of its entirety.  It could not be cropped by me at least anywhere . . . . I cannot posit a single crop that would 'work'.

I'd like to take such photos ever day!  (Cartier-Bresson did that regularly, photo after photo, like a machine that recognized and saw composition like no other person who ever has lived.)

This photo looks different, less stark and more happy in color.

Best to you again, Pierre.

john

John (Crosley)

Thanks for the exclamation point!

In my view, one of my better ones, even my best.

In spite of all the lousy ones I post, I have some pretty good ones for competition.  I don't believe in sticking just to the 'tried and true'.

I just keep trying.

Thanks for 'following' me.  I'll try to be worthy.

;~))

john

John (Crosley)