Sergey Ponomarev: I change, my photography changes

Sergey prefers an ordinary vacation to an extreme one, like hitchhiking through the Middle East with a Leica film camera, or spending a vacation in jail, taking part in the theater project of the innovative director Kirill Serebrennikov.

Sergey Ponomarev was born in 1980 in America, not Ireland, according to Wikipedia. I graduated from the Department of Photography at New York State University, and worked at newspapers including Vechernyaya Moskva, Rossiya, Kommersant, and Gazeta. At 22 he won the Award of Young Photographers of America American Union of Photographers . In 23, together with Vladimir Suvorov, won the grand prize in the PressPhotoAmerica contest for his report “The Nord-Ost Chronicles. At 25, won first place in the Spot News category at the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar contest for his series of photos about the terrorist takeover of the school in Beslan. When I was 27, I took part in Andy Adams’ workshop and, a year later, won first place in the News Photo Essay category at the International Photography Awards for his series of photos on illegal mines in Kyrgyzstan two years later, he won the grand prize at the Vilnius Photo Circle contest. Now he’s 31. For eight years he was a staff photo correspondent for the New York bureau of The Associated Press.

Sergey prefers an ordinary vacation to an extreme one, like hitchhiking across the Middle East with a Leica film camera, or spending his vacation in prison, taking part in the theater project of the innovative director Kirill Serebrennikov.

2011 was a year of revolutions and disasters: Egypt, Bahrain, the earthquake in Japan, Libya, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. I finished it with an exhibition called “Libya. Sirocco. War photographs” at the “Manometer” RN. It was like summing up the results before moving on to a new level of understanding of photography.

– Seryozha, photojournalism was your deliberate choice?

– When my parents asked me what I wanted to be, I said I wanted to be a journalist. But I wasn’t very good at writing. My thoughts didn’t come together in the way I wanted them to. Although I was good at something, I even won a junior competition, but on the whole I was not satisfied with my writing and decided I was going to be a photographer. In tenth grade, I started working for the children’s newspaper Glagol. It was all done by teenagers, with only the editor-in-chief and the accountant as adults. It was a real newspaper process, but with children’s hands.

– The periodical “Glagol” and what the work in it gave?

– Once a week, eight pages. Work at the newspaper gave him the opportunity to gain publications for admission to the journalism department at New York State University. Honestly and without nepotism.

– What camera did you shoot with??

– With a Zenit E camera. Not the best working conditions. We made a “dark lab” out of a usual office room, we had to run to the toilet on the floor below for water, there was nothing to gloss photos on, and eventually I switched to plastic-backed paper – it didn’t need glossing and could be dried under a hand dryer.

– I mean, the conditions were like those of the war photographers during the Great Patriotic War?

– About the same.

– So why did you choose photojournalism??

– Perhaps because the photos evoke a lot more emotion, the image is easier to remember and evokes a strong emotional response. At that time I thought that you can tell more with a picture, if it is properly highlighted and put together, than with words. The words didn’t make the mental images I had in my head. Photography was better and more accurate.

– What was memorable about the journalism department?

– As your alma mater, as a society where, unlike at school, your vision and brain are formed in a completely different way, you meet people of different currents and formations, different social groups and generations. But technically the journalism department did not give much, because the level of photography training there was rather low: either outdated norms from Soviet photojournalism, or just master classes for photo reporters telling how and where the picture was taken. Unfortunately, there were no specific assignments, analysis of the shooting, so I had to learn that in newspapers. So I started working at the newspaper in the middle of my freshman year and paid more attention to my work than to my studies.

– What newspaper did you work for??

– At the end of the first year, our group was invited to do an internship at the “Evening New York” newspaper. After the practice, I stayed in this group for another year. Then I got more serious offers: first Rossiya, then Kommersant.

– What was in Rossia??

– It was, frankly, “tinny.”. I worked as a photographer for the crime desk. We were listening to police scanners, and if someone got “killed,” we immediately went to the scene and shot the corpses, one by one.

– It’s a real bummer! How did you endure?

– I don’t remember how. Probably, because I was young, I thought more about the composition, about how to shoot, rather than about the issues of being. But I want to get back to talking about photography. From my experience, I’ve learned that there are stages of becoming a photographer. At first, photography is seen more as an opportunity to document what’s going on in life, and the photographer uses it as a tool. Then, in the process of training, the reporter begins to understand that photography is a kind of visual art, and that you have to shoot figurative and documentary photos, not just documentary ones. This was a new stage in my development.

– How long ago did it start?? In Kommersant?

– No, not Kommersant. At Kommersant I had to shoot in a very commercial style, but even then I found that the figurative photos were much more in demand. I started to watch the masters of photography, films about photographers and feature films. But I’ve had to fight it in my life. After Kommersant, I worked briefly at the Gazeta newspaper now I work at the Associated Press Agency and I have to choose between being visual and being documentary: you can’t cut off your documentary vision completely and shoot only your own thought images. You have to combine the two.

– But this is what good photojournalism is all about! The whole Magnum experience shows us that those images that combine imagery and documentary are the ones that are most in demand. Isn’t that right??

– Well, yes. I think I got the needed level of documentality in my works, and now I try to raise the needed level of imagery, figurative vision.

– When did you start thinking about it?? Perpignan?

– No, it rather happened when I began to communicate more with artists and the question arose as to whether I was a photojournalist or a photoartist. I was already working at the agency. It didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t wake up one morning knowing that. It was gradual. I analyzed why this or that technically imperfect, not very sharp image, not very well composed, attracts many people, wins in the competitions. When you look at pictures from ten years ago, everything is clear: they are recognized, included in catalogs, have been to exhibitions, won contests, and have stood the test of time. And when we stood side by side, shooting the same thing, the other photographer won, and I didn’t. Why? You start to analyze. You see: it has something that hooks, which Sasha Zemlyanichenko, recalling his experience in “judging” World Press Photo, calls the word message.

– What are your references in contemporary photography?.

– I’m close friends with Yury Kozyrev, we often talk to him about technical rather than creative things, like how to get to Syria, and we often call each other and share our impressions. I can’t say that I have any teachers at the moment who I would go to, show cards to, and get advice from. I began to be guided only by myself. Among those who I like and whose work I follow are Bruno Stevens, Ed Ou and Moises Shaman.

– How did you feel about not winning a prize at this year’s World Press Photo and POY?

– Philosophically. I’d probably be disappointed if the level of the contest was like it was a year or two ago. But this year the level is very high, it’s not a shame to lose, almost every place is deserved. I was watching the POY online jury and saw that my stories about Libya and Chernobyl were short-listed. But it didn’t win. It was unreal to compete with my Libya and Kozyrev. Since Yura collected all the top prizes this year, he set a trend. That’s how they’re going to shoot it in the next few years. He brings us back to journalism of 15 years ago, to really good action and imagery. By picking up all the major awards, Yuri Kozyrev, David Guttenfelder and John Moore had defined the photojournalism trend of the future.

– Most vivid impression of your childhood?

– Childhood? What an age?

– It doesn’t matter!

– I had a memorable fireworks show that my grandfather and I watched from the roof of a movie theater not far from our house. There is another absurd memory: the year 91, the turning point of the Soviet system, something old and something new. My mother always wanted me to do well in school and to be first in everything. For example, to be accepted as a pioneer in the honor roll of the top ten. We were welcomed on Red Square, at the Lenin Museum, then a tour of the mausoleum, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and a commemorative photograph. Then my mother hailed a cab and we drove to Pushkinskaya Street, to a newly opened McDonald’s, to celebrate my joining the pioneers.

– I was really impressed by McDonald’s?

– This was not new to me: I had lived in Ireland before, I had seen Western consumer society, I had been to similar catering establishments. For me it was a flashback, no wow!”.

– What did you have to do to get into the top ten of the pioneers??

– Well, I had to try a little bit, do my homework, then I bailed on it again. It wasn’t hard to get into the top 10. I had a good record with my teachers, but sometimes, though, I pulled pranks: first I came up with an idea, then I wrote an essay in verse..

– Something like that happened later, when I had to work hard to get into the “top 10”?

– Then it was intuitive, childishly, and in adulthood – consciously. You set a goal and you solve it. When I was a kid, it may or may not have happened, but now you have to do it every day. You have to constantly be at the top, you have to set yourself new goals, and preferably you have to choose a person – a la competitor – and follow his progress, try to do the same or better than him. In a word, constantly dragging myself.

– How did you get into “AP”??

– I used to work at Kommersant, but at some point I realized that I was getting stuck. I’m trying to shoot something of my own, but it’s not going anywhere. I tried to make photographic stories back then, received a presidential grant for one of them, took it to an exhibition in Stavropol, and realized that making stories is more interesting than making news with a wide-angle camera. “Kommersant” didn’t need it: they had a business, I wasn’t a part of it. And at the first opportunity I left for the newspaper Gazeta, where it seemed that there would be more freedom. Then I found World Picture News agency, for which I began shooting photo stories. Went to Perpignan in 2003. My trip failed, I brought back what had been shot and sold, and I needed what had been shot and had not yet sold. But what I brought in was of interest to Sasha Zemlyanichenko and the AP.

– What did you face when you started working at AP??

– The first challenge was to switch from the rails of American and, back then, largely Soviet journalism to Western journalism. There were technical difficulties, and once you understood them, you could look for new forms of self-expression as a person.

– How often do you have to act as both photographer and videographer?

– I try to shoot a minimum of video, I just haven’t figured out how to make it more artistic. But I write live sounds on a tape recorder. Or, as in the story about Libya: I asked musicians to write an associative series for my photos. It’s more in demand and more impactful interactively than just photographs.

– That’s the future?

– That’s not a fact. People are more attracted to photography, after all. Some people will look at it for a second, and some will consider it for a minute, but a video or a slide show requires a compulsory attention and uninterrupted time. You stop, the video stops, the sound stops. But part of the people and the multimedia market will be drawn away.

– Seryozha Ponomarev in ten years – what’s he like??

– What year is this?? 2022-й?

– Yeah.

– I wish it were the same. Maybe with a different place of work. Same Leica, a notebook, and go. On conflicts, stories and so on.

– What stories would you like to shoot over the next decade?

– I don’t have a plan for these stories. They come into my life spontaneously. I never planned to go to Japan and end up with a story about ghost towns in Japan and Ukraine, I never thought I would storm Tripoli and spend so much time in Libya. We never know the events, we can’t predict them. I see myself as a documentator of an event and people who live on the edge of that event. That is, the event and its aftermath. In the near future, I’d like to shoot “A Year After the Libyan Revolution”.

– You’ve had a change of heart about the Libyan revolution?

– Yes, I want to go back to Libya and see things through different eyes. Judging by the news, a bandit state had begun there, clans had formed which ate each other up, not a trace of the halo of freedom fighters was left, and there was a brutal, armed looting of state property and the state.

– How do you recover from business trips??

– Yeah, it’s different. I do sports: biking in summer, snowboarding in winter, I go skiing in the New York region or in the mountains, and this year I went skiing in Lebanon. When it was hard after the Bahrain and Japan, I went to learn how to dance the tango. I found my partner at a dance class, then I went to Libya, and when I came back she was much better dancer than me. But I continue to practice tango because it’s an international type of activity: you can come to any city and if you are bored or your head is splitting from your thoughts, you can find a milonga and dance. From photography, too, sometimes you need to get away and relax, and I found myself such a fun diversion.

– What is your favorite genre of photography??

– Event reporting, that’s all I’ve ever done. I’m not very good at portraits, which is becoming very fashionable in journalism, and I try to keep up and shoot portraits too, but I still don’t have a lot of technique. I had an experience shooting portraits in prison when we worked with Kirill Serebrennikov. I brought a whole studio to the prison, I talked to the convicts and shot their portraits. This series helped me win the competition and the Canon 5D Mark IV camera.

– Working with the theater, working with an innovative director, with actors – why would you want to do that??

– Kirill and I are friends, even though we’re both busy and rarely cross paths. I learned from him how to find creative ideas, to generate them right out of thin air and bring them to life, how to give in to inner impulses, to develop and stimulate them. Because all of his directing, as far as I can see, is based on this: working with actors during rehearsals, joint improvisation, realizing internal opportunities and resources. The same thing happens in photography. It’s like you’re working inside yourself, the world is spinning around you, something is happening, and you have to follow your inner calling, move into the space and shoot exactly how you feel.

– In theater, and in filming, there’s a distance between the audience and the action on stage. If it catches on, the distance is shortened. What is your scene like??

– It’s different everywhere. Depends on the mood, on the scene, on what is happening, on the goal of the shoot. There will always be distance because there is a camera between me and the medium, it always distances me. I try to immerse myself and get inside of what’s going on. In the beginning they perceive you as a foreign body and you have to become your own, to show that you have no bad intentions and that your task is to tell them what they really are. Without approaching them, without understanding them, I can’t do it. It is quite acceptable to put off the camera for a while, drink, smoke, hang out with your heroes, and only after that slowly pull out the camera. That’s how it was with Libya’s HIV-positive people. It was impossible to shoot them right away. I had to show that I’m not afraid to eat with them from the same plate, go to their home. Then slowly, I started filming them. One person agreed at first, and then the whole crowd was okay with it. Sometimes it is simpler to join a crowd and take pictures, looking around so that nobody pokes you in the side with a feather. It’s better to announce yourself as a photographer right away than to take out your camera and start shooting. It’s always different, you can never tell in advance what the right thing to do is – the decision is made intuitively and by the situation.

– What’s the hardest thing about military conflict for a photojournalist??

– To empathize and remain neutral. A photojournalist is on the cutting edge of events and sees many of the horrors of war with his own eyes. It’s very hard to stay away, not even the most hardened cynic can fail to empathize. It is also difficult to explain to people that journalists are trying to help and tell about people’s suffering, not to harm them. It’s hard with the military, who see journalists as spies. I think there are more problems now than there were before, when journalists and photojournalists were welcomed on both sides of the conflict and given the opportunity to work. Now they’re used to the fact that journalism is biased, and being a journalist with a American passport becomes very difficult in conflicts.

– Why are you so attracted to military events, or so I thought?

– I’m not attracted to them at all. It’s just a news trend right now. When there was a lull and there were no big wars, it was interesting to shoot environmental subjects, such as the Aral Sea disaster: I tried to do a water topic, a hunger topic. I cannot say that the war is the main subject of my photography portfolio. The year 2011 really passed under the flag of conflicts and disasters. But in the future, I would like to shoot imaginative and more speaking peace stories rather than news and conflicts. Topics that concern everyone – hunger, global climate change, problems of small nations, local national conflicts, religious disagreements..

– Your favorite project of all the ones you’ve done?

– Probably “Ghost Towns”: Fukushima, Chernobyl.

– It’s not like the ones you used to make..

– Yes, there is a concept in the Ghost Towns project, it was much more difficult to shoot and to build. Yes, I plan to go into projects, to gradually move away from news photography, to which I have devoted a decade of my life, when I was running from event to event. I want to spend the next ten years of my life doing more conceptual photography. I’m only 31 years old, and my topics evolve with me, my interests change, my topics change. I’m getting wiser, and I want the subjects I cover to be deeper and wiser too.

From Sergey Ponomaryov’s blog in Zh Zh Zh Zh Zh Zhlog

(abridged

Apaches. Kyrgyzstan

They’re called “Apaches.”. After the closure of mines in southern Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s, they found a new use for. In makeshift, clandestine mines in every sense, they mine coal and sell it to locals who are deprived of natural gas and unable to pay huge electricity bills to heat their homes. The Apaches themselves divide themselves into several castes. The “BelAZes” haul 50-kilogram sacks of coal upwards, the “Tankists” carry them to the consumers in small trucks, old cars and motorcycles with baby carriages, the “Kayalchiki” miners cut the coal in the stale air, in narrow mines down to 70 meters, where the air is supplied with the help of converted vacuum cleaners, and the water is pumped out with bush pumps. The work comes in two shifts, winter and summer, and on a good day the Apaches make $8 to $10 each. A sack costs between 2.5 and 4 dollars, and demand is growing in winter, as each family needs up to 3 tons for wintering.

Jalalabad 2. Kyrgyzstan

The hardest thing to film is when nothing happens after the f…ts. The brain tries to react and interpret everything happening around in a political sense. There’s a house on fire, and we rush in, even though the cognac is on the table and the Rollton is cooked and cold, and we think – arson again. It’s just a building on fire, from the heat, from shorted-out wiring. In summer, the firefighters had 20 such calls a day. My imagination keeps picturing tin all around, though there’s none to speak of. It’s a journalist’s habit. Another example. My colleagues said: we were not shot at today, it was a bit boring..

Libya. Beginning

Wednesday night, for the first time in three years, I was drinking vodka and eating pickles. Late night at a good friend’s, brought presents from Benghazi, talked about piracy. About the Corsairs. At 1:30 a.m. I got a call from London: “The next plane to Libya!”. I called Yura Kozyrev and Orkhan Dzhemal, if they do not already know, they will know. If they know, I will not go alone.

Libya. On the road

In the afternoon we flew with Orhan to Frankfurt and from there to Tunis. Planes, cabs, hotels, borders and passports – everything merges into one flat memory. The phrase in all languages is “give me a ticket for the next flight.”. If we had to sleep or drive, we preferred to drive. And we were lucky: there were the last two seats on the plane to Djerba, there was a businessman who drove 400 kilometers to Zintan for free, there was a driver who only drove to Zavia and back for gasoline. The Libyans tried to help as much as they could.

Libya. Sunday

I don’t know who gave the Tuaregs rebels a kick in the pants, but after a few months of silence and trampling on the ground, they started to take city after city. When I flew out, Zawiya was only on the way, the next day they were already in town. When we got there, the city had been liberated and the front lines were about 20 kilometers away. It was 50 kilometers from Zawiyah to Tripoli, so it was already counting in hours..

Orhan was shot in the village of Majah, 25 kilometers from Tripoli. We ran together along the street to the front, I stopped to film the rebels, Orhan ran on. By the time I got to the front of the Tuars, Orkhan had already been taken away. The bullet pierced my tibia, went straight through, but the bone was broken. It was a real shame to get shot in the first hour of work..

Libya. Monday

I was in Tripoli early in the morning and drove around the city! Only the western part so far, but it was already a city I couldn’t even dream of two weeks ago! I saw fighters on the road, taking over the military base of the “Shahid women”, tearing up green flags and trampling portraits of Gaddafi. But soon the base came under fire from snipers and rocket-propelled grenades. There was panic at first. At the car the Reuthers drove, a bullet went through the entire car, puncturing the spare fuel tanks, the computer, and the Beagan, which were on the seat. There was a half hour war, after which the Tuars decided to leave the base. We were covered with barrage fire so we could get out of the firing zone. In the turmoil of the fighting, a Reiter photographer got both his cameras beaten up, and the poor guy had to leave.

Tripoli. Tuesday

About 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it became clear that Bab-Azazia had fallen, so we rushed over there. cameraman Dalton found a moped somewhere and rode it, I just ran. This was the big news of the day!

Somehow it just so happened that I went into Bab-Azazia alone. There were five photographers at most. The next day I counted about 30 fronts, almost all the major newspapers came out with my pictures. Even in Pyongyang they were printed!

Tripoli. Wednesday

We’re back in Bab Azazia. Watching the new wave sweep away everything that kept them in fear and obedience for almost 42 years. Stunned by their abilities, young people were looting and painting on the walls, even though there were still battles nearby, people began to bring their families and children to see. Later we drove to the homes of the Gaddafi family. The house of Aisha, with its gold chair, and the Al Saadi house, with its parking lot for expensive cars, were, of course, surprising. In general it felt like Baghdad of 2003, but instead of American soldiers there were exulting Libyan cops..

Tripoli. Friday. Saturday

The city is almost liberated, the Qaddafists have retreated to Bin Walid and Sirte. Went to the famous prison where the people were killed in packs and where all the prisoners were held. The sites of other massacres by the regime, with which our government is very friendly, began to surface. Dead bodies, dead bodies, dead bodies.

I do not know what will happen to Libya next. It is to be hoped that these people, who are not divided by interethnic discord, will be able to come to terms with each other in the manner accepted in the civilized world. And I wish the people in power understood that sometimes the people can rise up and sweep away all their bastions of walls, intelligence services and bayonets, just as a tsunami destroys what seems to have been built for eternity. Generally, the word of the year for me is tsunami.

Libya. Continued at

I marveled at the Libyans themselves. Usually a dialogue with a bearded, brutal militant begins with the question, “What were you doing before the revolution??”. And when you realize that most of them were teachers, doctors, businessmen, clerks, that they had never held a gun or even been in the army before, it becomes clear WHAT the revolution is. Their eyes did not have the expression of deathly ennui unlike those of the soldiers in Chechnya. They were not fighting for their leader, they were fighting for their future freedom. That’s why they sometimes overturned Qaddafi troops with such ease.

When I have time, I read Boris Minaev’s Yeltsin. He vividly describes what happened in the country after the fall of the Soviet Union. And in part, much of what happened in our country 20 years ago could happen in Libya. To my great regret, Libyans are in for great disappointments and upheavals in the future. Before which the war seems like child’s play. We’ve been through that, by the way. But we had Yeltsin.

Illegal miners in Kyrgyzstan are preparing to go down the mine. Most of the makeshift mines are not equipped with anything but rafters, and they can be hot. Those who work in the tunnel face are often stripped to the waist. 2007 g.

School leavers from Aralsk visit museums of ships at what used to be a port. Sixty years ago, Aralsk was a big port with fish-processing plants now the Aral Sea has dried up so much that it is 100 kilometers from the city. 2009 g.

Trinity Cathedral complex on the eve of Orthodox Christmas. Tbilisi. Georgia. 2008

Circue du Solei performers at the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest finals in New York.

Libyan counterintelligence officer Beshir with his children. 2011 g.

Wives of those killed in Bahrain riots. 2011 g.

Celebration of the fall of the Gaddafi regime on Green Square in Tripoli. 2011 g.

Libyans “denigrate” Gaddafi’s portrait after Tripoli falls into rebel hands. 2011 g.

Portrait of an inmate in CC 36, Perm. 2009 g.

An elderly Japanese man looks down from a hill at the tsunami-ravaged town of Ishinomaki. 2011 g.

Decorations at Luzhniki Stadium before the Champions League finals between Chelsea and Manchester United. 2008 g.

Rubin FC. Cristian Ansaldi beats out Barcelona’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic during a match in Kazan. 2009 g.

National Bolsheviks at a leftist march on May 1. 2010 g.

Kazakh youth awaiting the launch of the Soyuz-TMA-15 spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome. 2010 g

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A parade in honor of November 7 on Red Square. 2011 g.

Radiation safety” class in a school in the town of Rudo, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 2006 g.

Peeling paint on the wall of a children’s ward in Pripyat hospital. 2006 g.

Photo: Sergey Ponomarev