Glasnost is the word introduce in the Soviet political lexicon by the first (and the last) president of USSR Mikhail Gorbachev to describe openness and gradual lift of heavy censorship in the late Soviet Union in the end of 80s. Gorbachev was not going to liquidate Soviet block, just wanted to reform it, he was a true believer in a socialism "with a human face", but as the society became more and more open, the situation spun out of control of the Communist party and Gorbachev himself, and he and the rest of the Soviet regime had to give way to more determined reformers (Boris Yeltsin and his team) who kissed the Soviet Unian and the whole communist idea good bye. This image should remind the viewer that before Gorbachev era many great books were locked in secret KGB archives, and only in the 80s these forbidden books found their way back to the russian reader. I placed some books of formerly banned authors (Nabokov, Aksenov, Rozanov, Brodsky) in an old cabinet (would prefer to use a save box, but could not find one :(). I wanted them to "glow" from the depths of the box, so to light them up, placed a flash in the cabinet, pointed it into the door from inside, and slaved it to the on-camera flash. The torn piece of paper says "top secret" in Russian.
I hope that american and other non-russian voters will understand the meaning of this shot even without knowing cyrillic and before reading these "cliff notes", I guess we'll find out...
Post-processing: converted from RAW, selected, desaturated and slightly colorized the box, added noise, adjusted brightness, contrast, cloned out some dirt and hot spots.
Statistics
Place: 31 out of 101 Avg (all users): 5.6891 Avg (commenters): 7.1429 Avg (participants): 5.3509 Avg (non-participants): 5.7956 Views since voting: 1113 Views during voting: 378 Votes: 238 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
It's refreshing to read some suitable details written for a shot, rather than the everlasting lists of EXIF data, or the simple and dismissive 'N/A' - especially when asking for a CC piece on a photo. Thankyou for that, and thankyou for some way in to this image.
The difficulty, of course, is that in an Anglophone website, and a predominantly US-populated community, not only the Russian but even more the Cyrillic script is, I think, liable to alienate many voters. People just aren't going to give an image the time required to make a decent assessment. But you know this - your collection of ribbons tells me you know how to score here when you want to.
More than simply for the Russians, the eastern europeans, the primary moments of the 80's were about dissent against the autocratic regimes - not only the entire process of the 'velvet' revolutions, but also one recalls Tianenmen Square - arguably, photographically, the difining image of the period is of the young student stopping the tanks in the square.
This approach - I don't know: it has a certain obviousness, a certain blatant set-up quality that seems at odds to me with your message, with the intent of the image. I wonder if, perhaps, you've actually brought a rather 'western' cleanliness of image, of organisation of elements, to something that purports to illustrate a different world. The perfectness of the colour, the smoothness of light, the level of detail makes it absolutely clear that this is not only utterly 'posed', but also utterly digital and modern - modern in the sense of 'of the early years of the 21st century, rather than of a time of hiddenness, censorship and the years immediately before the real strike of the digital revolution - audio, in the form of the CD, had struck for sure (I was a student and yet had a CD player), but the internet, the ubiquity of the PC, and digital imaging were only on the horizon. For the purposes of this illustration, would you not want a greater feeling of desertion, of the forgotten: dust and cobwebs and a sense of a room forever locked?
Your choices are, of course, perfectly valid. The image was never going to resonate with the voters here in general: many are too young, few would give the image the time it deserves, and you only need glance at the winning images in this challenge to realise that what any period of history really means to people is the fashions of the time. Supposedly the ephemera - but if we ever needed a reminder of that ephemera you could take this challenge as an example. It's an indictment, but it's probably futile to resist - and the rise of this medium, the fact that anyone can publish whatever hits their mark, will lend it strength. Im' glad to see, however, that there are one or two people who will still resist that flow of nonsense. Thanks for a thought-provoking image.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
