PRESS RELEASE: The Tbilisi Photo Festival 2017 - Opening Week September 13 - 20

For its 8th edition The Tbilisi Photo Festival, the premier showcase for regional and international photography in the Caucasus, is back with its most provocative and diverse program to date! The central theme of festival 2017 is fashion! Fashion is, after all, a genuine representation of identity.

The festival program will emphasize all existing connections between fashion, the tradition of identity representation, ideology and the photographic image.

From Guy Bourdin’s seductive avant-garde photographs to Viviane Sassen’s daring approach to fashion images and the extremely rare collection of East German fashion photography from the Stasi period (1970s), as well as never-before-seen pre-Islamic revolution Iranian Fashion magazines, the week-long festival of shows, events and talks once again breaks new ground in subjects, styles and ways of seeing.

For it’s 8th edition, TPF is proud to host the world premier exhibition of Russian Journal Revisited by Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak and British writer Julius Strauss. 70 years later they travel in the footsteps of famous American writer John Steinbeck and Magnum agency co-founder Robert Capa, who visited and documented life in Georgia, Ukraine and Russia two years after the end of World War II.

Another 2017 highlight of the TPF program is the exhibition-tribute to the late American photojournalist and co-founder of Noor Images, Stanley Greene. Curated by Anna Shpakova, “See You in My Dreams”: Intimate Diary of Stanley Greene is a presentation of Stanley Greene’s unseen series of polaroids and personal letters.

Now in its eighth year, the Tbilisi Photo Festival has ensured its place as a must-stop meeting-point for photography and photographers from across Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

TPF EXHIBITIONS

Fashion Photography
The 2017 Tbilisi Photo Festival starts off with fashion photography and the work of Guy Bourdin and Viviane Sassen, both of whom are shown in the Caucasus for the first time.

Guy Bourdin, Avant-Garde

Guy Bourdin is definitely one of the “most important photographers of the second half of the twentieth century.” An autodidact artist, he re-defined the contours of contemporary fashion photography. For more than 40 years, his sublime iconic images - surreal, enigmatic, and humorous, are timeless and have had a major influence on the works of generations of photographers. TPF will inaugurate its 8th edition with an outstanding open air event that will combine the screening of Guy Bourdin’s work with a live music performance of Nika Machaidze/Nikokoi – one of Georgia’s leading contemporary composers and artists.

Viviane Sassen. In And Out Of Fashion

The Dutch star of fashion photography - Viviane Sassen has broken all the rules of contemporary fashion photography and challenged the way we see fashion in the context of our complex modern world. “Her images are complex, unexpected and breathtaking, and they are many conceptual leaps away from the mainstay approaches to fashion that have dominated the 21st century so far” Extract from In and out of Fashion, Bright Star by Charlotte Cotton.

Identities
Identities is a captivating group of shows that focuses on traditions and ways identity have been represented in the photographic image. Many of these are “found” images, several collections have never been seen before, while others have been published online or in book form. This series is noteworthy for its brazen humor and impact as a chronicle of the human condition: • Renowned Lithuanian photographer, Vitas Luckus’s series of portraits In Front of the White Screen (1987); • A stunning collection of studio portraits from 1970s central India by Suresh Punjabi, from the project Studio Suhag; • Never-before-seen pre- Islamic revolution Iranian fashion magazines; • Portraits of the Taliban found and collected in Afghanistan by Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak in early 2000s; • Bikini Collection from the private Trophy Collection of the Soviet Soldier (1950s); • Unveiled images of couples photographed in Iranian photo studios before the revolution; Extremely rare collection of fashion photography from East Germany by Gunter Roubitcz (1960s-1970s); • The Circle of Life, a collection of portraits of the inhabitants of Blenio Valley in Switzerland from 1910-25 by Swiss photographer Roberto Donetta. These along with other series are all part of Identities, one of the week’s great highlights for festival 2017.

Identities. Taliban. Collection of Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos  

See You In My Dreams!
Stanley Greene’s Intimate Diary
Curated by Anna Shpakova

Co-founder of the prestigious Noor agency, American photographer Stanley Greene started out as a fashion photographer but made a name for himself as a prominent war photographer.

Regarded as the “poet photojournalist,” Greene died in May 2017. Tbilisi Photo Festival presents a tribute to a dear friend and defender of the Caucasus. Anna Shpakova, a long-time friend of Stanley Greene and a curator of the exhibition explains, “For most (he is) a legendary photographer whose war and social injustice coverage will forever stay in the history of photography... For me, (he is) a master of the eminent world I am grateful to be part of... Countless letters and polaroids are evidence of a romance at a time when we were oblivious to the world falling.”

See You In My Dreams! features 30 letters and Polaroids that appeared in the spring and summer of 2001 “Only accompanists of a romance, are becoming a narration, allowed us to penetrate, without being the voyeurs, to the singular rhythm of Stanley Greene,” Anna Shapokova says. This exhibition is a personal, heartfelt presentation of the man; not a display of his work.

Russian Journal Revisited by Thomas Dworzak and Julius Strauss

In 1947, American writer John Steinbeck and Magnum photographer Robert Capa set out to objectively document the USSR. Their journey took them to Russia, Ukraine and Georgia. 70 years later, Magnum Photographer Thomas Dworzak and British journalist Julius Strauss have teamed up to re-explore the 1947 journey with the same original aim Steinbeck described as, "honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn't know sufficiently." TPF is proud to host the world premier exhibition of this bold project, which will prove to be a deeply perceptive comparison and contrast of the times.


Georgian Journey: Robert Capa in Georgia - the collection of Robert Capa’s 1947 images from Georgia will be also featured in the 2017 program of Tbilisi Photo Festival 2017.

Night of Photography 2017 at Fabrika
Open Air Night Screenings

Tbilisi Photo Festival continues its tradition of conducting open air night-time screenings of first-class photography from around the world. This year, however, the Night of Photography moved from the streets of Old Tbilisi to a refurbished Soviet sewing factory called Fabrika - a creative multi-purpose urban space situated in a historical neighborhood. The work of over 350 photographers will be featured on the screens set up on Fabrika’s roof, as well as in the laid back lobby of its hostel, and in the generous courtyard, surrounded by restaurants and bars - and even in hostel dorm room 137.

The Eye of Photography, British Journal of Photography, Photo Vogue Festival, Delhi Photo Festival, Finish Museum of Photography, Ibasho Gallery with the selection of Japanese female photographers and some other, are joining the program of the Tbilisi Night of Photography for the first time in 2017. The Night of the Year of Les Rencontres d’Arles has also returned to Tbilisi. A selection of slideshows will be screened in memory of the late Claudine Maugendre, who had been Artistic Director of the Night of the Year of Les Rencontres d’Arles for many years. Lensculture is again part of the Night –second year in a row. The selection of works of emerging Georgian Fashion photographers, Belarusian artists, emerging Dutch photographers, Vasa project with Kharkov Photography School, in addition to many others, will be featured on the Tbilisi Night of Photography 2017.

Night of Photography will be screened on opening week Saturday, September 16th from 20.00 to 01.30 @ Fabrika.

Vlisco at Tbilisi Photo Festival 2017

Georgia’s vibrant and dynamic fashion industry has lately found its place on the world map of fashion. To celebrate this and to underline Georgia’s stature as “new capital of fashion in Eastern Europe,” Tbilisi Photo Festival has invited Vlisco, the Dutch textile brand with a renowned 170 history as leader in print design using batik technique in West Africa, for a new collaboration with emerging Georgian designer, Lasha Devdariani, and Georgian fashion photographer, Luisa Chalatashvili. The collection will be presented in the event Vlisco, A Unique Fashion Story, along with a public lecture on design at Vlisco by Gabriela Sancez y Sancez de la Barquera, Vlisco in-house designer.

A conversation with Viviane Sassen

Coralie Gauthier, Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the prestigious Parisian club Silencio, designed by David Lynch, and the exclusive underground Paris club Salo, and founder of Since 1977, will moderate a conversation with Dutch fashion photographer Viviane Sassen.

Magnum Photos 70 at 70

2017 is Magnum Photo’s seventyyear anniversary. To commemorate its birthday, the world’s leading photo agency is curating seventy iconic images by seventy of its photographers that will be part of a screening with live music at Tbilisi Photo Festival 2017 at the stylish Rooms Hotel Garden.

Capa Curator Cynthia Young (ICP) on Robert Capa and Russian Journal
Talk/slideshow

The year Magnum was founded was the same year Capa and Steinbeck made their landmark journey to the USSR, just two years after the end of World War II. Cynthia Young, representing the Capa Archives at the International Centre of Photography in New York, will give a talk about Capa and the Russian Journal. Ms. Young will also have a conversation with Thomas Dworzak.

The Art of Fashion Photography with Patrick Remy
Talk/slideshow

French fashion photography critic Patrick Remy is known for his book series, Fashion Images de Mode and Strip/Paradise/Desire/Sensation (Steidl). Remy has also published photographer’s monographs and organized photo exhibitions in Miami, Tokyo and Melbourne. For TPF, Patrick Remy will be talking about fashion photography and the books of fashion photography.

Photography in the Margins: The Material History of an Indian Studio
Talk/slideshow

Anthropologist and art historian, Professor Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. He is a specialist for his studies on the visual culture of South Asia, specifically India, and is also curator of the Suhag Studio show, which is the part of our Identities program.

The Delhi Photo Festival & Photography from India by Dinesh Khanna
Talk/Slideshow

Dinesh Khanna is a photographer and co-founder of the Delhi Photo Festival, one of the most respected photo festivals in India. Mr. Khanna explains that India is a vast and diverse country of many languages and ethnicities, yet its arts and traditions are steeped in the visual. “In such a nation, photography and the image were bound to be an integral 'language' for social, political and economic conversations,” he says. TPF is eager to have Dinesh Khanna in Tbilisi to present these visual stories to help us understand the rich world of Indian photography.

Tbilisi Photo Festival Book Fair

Tbilisi Photo Book is the first and only photography book fair in the entire South Caucasus region. It was founded by Tbilisi Photo Festival to promote the production of photo books in Georgia. The collection includes photo books from Japan, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, France, India, Iran - and many other countries - as well as self-published books selected by our guests and the curatorial team.

At this old crossroads between East and West, the Tbilisi Photo Festival has become a new destination for the world’s photographers, bringing together the best images of the region and far beyond, transforming Tbilisi into photography capital of Caucasus.

Tbilisi Photo Festival 2017
September 13 - 20
Night of Photography on September 16

Elina Valaite
Program Coordinator

www.tbilisiphotofestival.com
www.tbilisiphotofestival.com/en/residency
www.facebook.com/tbilisiphotofestival

SLIDESHOW: Beyond Sochi by Thomas Dworzak. By Tamara Mirianashvili (flickr.com)

Magnum Photographer Thomas Dworzak presented his Photobook "Beyond Sochi" at the Writers' House in Tbilisi, Georgia.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Thomas Dworzak’s Instagram Chapbooks. By Nathan Thornburgh (roadsandkingdoms.com)

(roadsandkingdoms.com) Thomas Dworzak, German-born polyglot and leading member of the louche fraternity of war photographers in the Caucasus, is not a trivial man. Yes, he’s excitable and headstrong: when I’ve shared a table with him in homes or at Pur Pur in Tbilisi or Delicatessen in Moscow, he’s always been an unfiltered kinesis of wild gestures and strong opinions blasted through clouds of smoke. But his work, from the mass graves of Chechnya to the flooded Lower Ninth Ward, could be Capa. Or Rodin: his subjects hunch and writhe like the Burghers of Calais, turned to statues in a moment of anguish. It’s powerful, permanent photography.

So why does his latest project involve, in part, curating a bunch of teenagers’ selfies on Instagram?

Photo by: Thomas Dworzak

The answer comes tomorrow night, May 31, in Tbilisi. In the same salon of the Writers House where the Georgian Writers Union received John Steinbeck and Robert Capa in 1947, Dworzak will show his latest obsession: a series of chapbooks—paperback, printed—of Instagrams he curated from a somewhat delirious range of hashtags. They aren’t available online at all; lord knows if you or I will ever actually see these things. But I talked to Dworzak this weekend about Instagram, dictators, tannings beds, his latest assignment for National Geographic, and the need to get the hell out of the Caucasus from time to time.

Roads & Kingdoms: You just got back from the North Caucasus on assignment for National Geographic. Were you Instagramming while you were out there?

Thomas Dworzak: If you are an Instagrammer, I think it’s generally considered a privilege when you’re allowed to use the National Geographic, New Yorker, Time Magazine Instagram account. [But] I didn’t want to do it in this case. I’m not against it, I’m not in favor. I’m weird about this stuff.

R&K: You’re weird about this stuff?

TD: I don’t know, I’m not super comfortable with all of it. I have an Instagram account but I only accept people I know. I don’t want to be visible with the little odd bits and pieces of my life. I don’t want to have a situation where I go somewhere, I take a picture of something and somebody says “why didn’t you call me? You were in town.” That was a classic Facebook problem but I guess Instagram will be the same. I don’t even have Facebook, so I think my problems are lacking.

R&K: It’s a little ironic, then, what you’re doing for Tbilisi Photo Festival.

TD: I’m not into social media for the social sense because it’s not something I’m used to. I’m too old, I’m not comfortable with it. But I checked it out and by checking it out I’ve come across documents of social situations that I think are very remarkable. So I started collecting Instagram screenshots.
It’s not like, oh my God, I can snoop into people’s private lives. No, I think there’s more to it, I think there’s a real sensitivity to it. As a photographer, I’m more interested in what kind of access I can get to certain things, how I am in relation to what I’m photographing. I mean, I’m a big embed fan. I love embedding, I love getting close to people and living with them, so there’s always a limit, there’s always a thing where you can’t go any further. So I was playing on that theme. That’s my Instagram exercise, if you will.

R&K: So it’s all screenshots?

TD: The way to do it is you do a screenshot of your own phone. The funny thing about Instagram as I understand it is, and there are people who are more specialized in it, is that it’s an ephemeral thing, it’s [always] moving. Something comes up and then it’s gone again, you can’t even really look for – I mean it’s very hard to look for anything. There are hashtags, but there’s billions of pictures and if they’re not hashtagged you can’t find them anymore. There’s no way of searching them. I guess Instagram itself has some sort of a picture recognition software, how they get rid of the tits and dicks. If you try uploading a breast, it will dissapear. I’ve tried it.

So I find it exciting because… I mean I can Google interesting pictures and try and find them and put something together, that’s what a photo editor does. With Instagram there’s always this feeling that if you’re too late… The first book I did was on the pope election. I just threw it together, it’s nothing, it’s unpublished and I don’t think it should be published in that sense, but so the night the pope got elected, for some fucked up reason, I don’t know why, I started hashtagging what comes up with pope. And suddenly all this insane stuff comes up. People dressing themselves up as pope, people dressing their pets up as pope, people smoking pot like crazy and taking pictures of themselves, like with pot smoke everywhere. And then I sat down, watching TV, everybody was on St Peter’s square, taking pictures of the pope on the balcony, very bad pictures from far away, and all blurry.

I don’t really know what I’m doing this book for, I haven’t figured out what to do with this stuff because obviously this is people’s pictures. It’s a bit like collecting people’s photo albums, it’s a little in that spirit, but I don’t think it should be published. For me, the whole point is a little bit in the exclusivity and in the tenderness. Everybody can go on Instagram and look at everybody’s pictures if you just spend enough time on it. So to take this and something that’s so fast and disappearing, to put it back in a physical book, and have it in a very limited edition or access. I mean you can only sit down and look at the little book, that’s it. I don’t scan it; I don’t distribute it digitally, no. I don’t want to do that.

R&K: Are you selling it, are you giving it to friends?

TD: Nothing, I just showed it to people, I don’t know… I think in a way, it’s something that has a real value as a document, it should remain, of this epoch. Whatever. I’m going to do nine books or twelve and that’s it.
R&K:How many have you done?

TD: I’ve done nine so far, I might do three more. I don’t know, I don’t think I’m going to do anymore. I spend two days on one of them. I’m collecting pictures for a month, on and off, whenever I have time or I’m bored.

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"It’s the only place where there’s actually a dialogue between a North Korean official and Western punks."

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R&K: So you did #pope, what are some of the other ones?

TD: I did #habemuspapam, that was the first one. Another one I did was [head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan] Kadyrov’s Instagram account, which I find actually interesting because early on he was doing it unprofessionally, he wasn’t trying to use it as a sort of PR tool. I came across it very early, the old account. There are two [books] that are actually political self-representation. One is Kadyrov and the other one is a kid at the North Korean embassy in Berlin who puts up official pictures. What I found interesting more than the pictures—which is sort of the crazy North Korean stuff on [Kim Jong Un], president or whatever he is—there’s the whole dialogue section which I copied a lot of, which to my knowledge is the only place where there’s actually a dialogue between a North Korean official and Western punks or something. They sort of insult each other but also ask each other very interesting questions. It’s a bizarre exchange. So the North Korean book has a lot of emphasis on the comments. The other ones I didn’t do much text. 

R&K: Which part are you doing for the Tbilisi Photo Festival? Is it the Kadyrov part, is it a collection?

TD: I didn’t do it for the photo festival. I said to them, let’s not have a [photo] exhibition. If you want something from me, why don’t we put a table and we put these books and people can look at the books? I think that’s the right way to do it.

It’s all things that are somehow related to what I’m doing in my “real work”, I’ve covered the pope before, I’ve obviously done Kadyrov, I have done North Korea. I mean David Guttenfelder is doing an amazing job on Instagram from Korea. It’s beautiful. But I’m not so interested in professional photography from North Korea. Kadyrov is the most professional because he has his personal photographer who takes pictures of him doing all this weird stuff, when he kisses an animal or something. So that’s another guy doing it, but I really like it if it’s sort of educated amateurs. Because what’s nice about this is also the aesthetics. They take decent pictures. You can look at it, it’s not totally off. 

R&K: Even the kid from the North Korean embassy?

TD: Well the kid from the North Korean embassy actually puts up stuff that is given to him. But with the North Koreans it’s really more the dialogue in that side. But there’s these weird things coming in, like there’s this one German kid who’s a fervent supporter of North Korea, constantly loves all the pictures, he’s this weird guy and posts the pictures up for himself and you just look at the guy, it’s just so funny. It’s funny to see who the people are that make ‘likes’. 

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"For a photographer, [the tanning bed] is a place you will never be able to take a picture. You don’t fit in there."

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The next book I did was the most innocent one. I don’t know how I came across it, but there’s an incredible fashion for women, especially in northern countries—you never really know where it’s from but you sort of get a feel for who they are, what their names are, etc, so mostly Russians, Ukrainians, Germans and Scandinavians—to take pictures of themselves in a solarium [tanning bed]. 

So they’re inside the thing. For a photographer, that’s a place you will never be able to take a picture because you don’t fit in there. It’s sort of a private joke, ha ha ha, you have to take it yourself; I can’t take a picture. And of course it’s just all pictures of body parts in different fluorescent lights, but if you take 100 of them, it gives you a nice scale of all the colors in the world. That’s the dumb end of the whole [project], the unpolitical part.

R&K: It does sort of flatten everything… I mean when you have this one very weird little publishing platform, it kind of flattens dumb, political, profound and everything else.

TD: The pope was hilarious for me because like every idiot who does hashtag #dope that night thinks, oh #dope, let’s also do #pope…. I don’t know, it was very funny the whole thing. 

I did another book on school trips to Auschwitz, like kids, because that’s sort of the forlorn generation, these hundreds of thousands of European school buses driving to Auschwitz every year. They’re like pictures from a school trip and then suddenly there’s this overwhelming drama of being in Auschwitz. I mean, so it’s like, I found it very tragic. There’s a few pretty sick things of course because they dress up as Hitler so whatever, but in general it’s very tragic. There’s something also, I don’t know, when you get into this, you don’t get into the closeness. 

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"[Boston] had beautiful pictures, like really moody and suddenly they got this SWAT guy sitting in their living room."

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I did one on the Boston thing because that’s sort of a classic. It has been used in the mainstream media, but it was nice. It was this whole sort of Rear Window, also because if you go to a place like Boston or the school kids that go to Auschwitz, it’s really those people who excessively use cellphone cameras, all the time, so you have an incredible choice of pictures to pick from. So Boston was amazing. Just the amount of pictures of SWAT teams through windows… And beautiful pictures, like really moody and suddenly they got this SWAT guy sitting in their living room. 

The second volume of that is all the girls who write Free Djokhar on their hands, I mean there’s like hundreds of them, hundreds of white American teenagers who think that Tsarnaev is the sex symbol of the 21st century.

R&K: When you were in the North Caucasus, were you checking out the kids and their phones and just trying to see are they using it the same way?

TD: No, not at all actually because I really wanted to sort of… I had a really funny thing, I was riding from Vladikavkaz to Grozny and there’s this kid sitting next to me and suddenly I realize he’s actually liking every single picture on Kadyrov’s Instagram account. It’s just weird; I didn’t even want to talk to him. I took a picture of him and put it up on Instagram.

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"I think the Free Djokhar thing to a big extent is really a Western teenage Stockholm Syndrome."

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I saw a girl putting up a Free Djokhar poster from a bus and then got out of the bus and was trying to catch her and she disappeared. She was like a normal, Western-looking kid. I think the Free Djokhar thing to a big extent is really a Western teenage Stockholm Syndrome or something. It’s got nothing to do with Islam or the Caucasus. The more I collected, I tried to exclude anybody who could have been from the area, my whole thing was to find people who had nothing to do with this.

R&K: So tell me how it’s going to go down at the festival, it’s literally going to be a table with these books on them?

TD: Yes, definitely the library and if someone wants to come, they can consult and they can take one and sit down. 

R&K: So there will be no digital thing?

TD: No, definitely not digital.

R&K: All just printed?

TD: All just printed.

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"I’m not happy with what’s happening [in Georgia] but it’s not like, oh my God it’s so horrible to be based here."

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R&K: Right now, what is going on in Georgia for you as a photographer? I talked with [Tbilisi Photo Festival co-director] Nestan Nijaradze a little bit about the elections and the politics of May 17th, but are you finding it a strange place to be based?

TD: Georgia is Georgia. I mean I’m not happy with what’s happening [but] for now, I’m here. I wasn’t here for the 17th, I think it’s ugly. On the other hand, it’s what people think and now it suddenly came out. It’s not like, oh my God it’s so horrible to be based here. It’s just that I’m not going to continue to deal with Georgian politics. It’s not my subject. I’m following Misha [Saakashvili] and when he’s gone he’s going to be gone. I mean I’m following on and off whenever I’m here I do something and then sometimes I make money. After him, I’m not personally interested in Georgina politics. 

R&K: But you guys are not going anywhere?

TD: No, I’m staying here [for now]. I want to go to Iran, I’m working on it. I’ve always said I want a change anyway. Every five years I have to get out of the Caucasus, I have to get out of Georgia because it’s so absorbing. I need to force myself to do something else. That was independent from the elections. So next Spring, I want to do something else.

Nathan Thornburgh is the co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms and the intrepid voice behind @roadskingdoms. He is a former editor and foreign correspondent at TIME Magazine.

IN MOTION: Free Nowrooz. Photos by Thomas Dworzak (magnumphotos.com)

(inmotion.magnumphotos.com) Because of strict Islamic laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, more liberal minded Iranians need to travel abroad to celebrate Nowrooz in freedom. Thomas Dworzak takes a look at the Nowrooz celebrations in Georgia.

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Thomas Dworzak's portfolio

PHOTOESSAY: The New Silk Road. By Brett Forrest. Photograph by Alex Webb (ngm.nationalgeographic.com)

(ngm.nationalgeographic.com) A railroad through the southern Caucasus will soon connect Europe and Asia, fueling dreams and discord in the region.

The dynamite comes from Ankara. Ten tons, and it takes two days. The truck climbs carefully, screwing 2,500 feet up the mountains of northeastern Turkey, where the clouded sun makes faraway ice fields roll like a distant sea. This is beautiful, forbidding country, through which a new railroad will soon run.

Arslan Ustael awaits the dynamite in the snow, with night temperatures reaching 40 below. Standing before the rail tunnel, Ustael says that in this weather your spit freezes before it hits the ground. He is a young man still, 30, and free with Turkish good humor, even up here in the cold clouds waiting for the dynamite that will make the volcanic mountain agreeable to his demand to bore a tunnel through it. Free with good humor because he knows this is an undertaking that could make a young engineer's career: building the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, an "Iron Silk Road" that will connect the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to Turkey—and beyond to Europe.

The travels of antiquity are tiring to contemplate. The 750-mile stretch of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is known as the Caucasus, named for the mountain range through which Ustael is digging his tunnel. Before the region got swallowed up by the Russian Empire, the Caucasus served as a transit point between Europe and Asia; the old Silk Road passed through it. Yet transport between West and East has never been easy. For centuries, to get from one sea to the other, you had to paddle north up the Don River from the Sea of Azov, portage over the steppe, then drift down the Volga to the Caspian. Only when the Russians began building railroads over the Caucasus in the 19th century could you travel more directly across the region.

The Iron Silk Road will launch a new chapter in the history of the Caucasus. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the newly independent republics of the southern Caucasus—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—regained strategic importance. A realization of the enormity of the oil and natural gas reserves lying beneath and along the Caspian Sea ignited a scramble to lay pipelines across the southern Caucasus to bring those resources to the European market. Today the pipelines are operational, and the BTK is being built to grease a trade boom, transporting European goods east and petroleum products west across the southern Caucasus. Once completed, by 2012, the railway will begin at the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and travel through the Georgian city of Tbilisi, before carrying on to Kars, a Turkish post town on the southwestern lip of the Caucasus region.

The participation of Turkey signals a new alignment in a region often viewed as Russia's backyard. Like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline—which opened in 2005 to bring oil from Baku to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean—the BTK railway is the result of an alliance between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; neighboring Armenia was deliberately left out of the party. And like the pipeline, this east-west corridor will provide an alternative to going through Russia to the north or Iran to the south. It is a more than $600-million project of economic development, social engineering, or shrewd geopolitics, depending on your point of view, which in the southern Caucasus shifts as quickly as the snow that obscures the mountain road.

For Ustael, chief of the tunnel operation on the Turkish-Georgian border, this railroad has become something else: a road to loneliness. Back in Trabzon, a temperate, Turkish Black Sea coastal town, his girlfriend's face clouded when she imagined two years in the Caucasus Mountains, for that is how long it will take to build this tunnel. She just couldn't do it. Ustael exhales, stirs the sugar through his tea. A man must make choices. Smoke hangs over the canteen. Workers chalky with tunnel dust stare distantly at the men in sun and shorts chasing a ball across the TV. Through the windows, another blizzard is mixing up the air. In World War I, 90,000 Ottoman soldiers waited in these mountains for the Russians to come. "Some froze to death without firing a shot," Ustael says. He grabs a hard hat and walks to the door. Tunnel work progresses in round-the-clock, three-hour shifts.

Work is likewise endless for the Turkish state, toiling to gain acceptance into the European Union (EU). Turks look indignantly at countries like Bulgaria and Romania that have already been accepted, places with much less developed economies and greater corruption. Turkey, the Cold War NATO ally, meanwhile, waits for an invitation that may never come. This "raises questions of fairness, at least," says N. Ahmet Kuşhanoğlu, the Turkish deputy director of transport in charge of railways. "Turkey's face is turned westward since two centuries." Now Turkey is looking east in order to make itself indispensable to the West. Once the Marmaray rail tunnel opens in 2013 beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul, trains from Baku will reach all the way to London. "It is easy to see that this railway shall serve Europe also," says Kuşhanoğlu.

Looking directly east, Turkey has lately sought to repair relations with its neighbor Armenia. In 1993 it had closed the border and shut down its rail service with Armenia as a sign of loyalty to Azerbaijan—a close Turkish ally with the same Muslim religion—after Christian Armenia helped ethnic Armenians in the Azerbaijan enclave of Nagor­no-Karabakh wage a bloody war to secede. Last year in Zurich, under the watchful eyes of the EU and the U.S., Turkey signed an agreement with Armenia to mend diplomatic ties and reopen the border. But the Armenians then demanded that Turkey acknowledge that the 1915 massacres of its people constituted genocide, which Turkey is loath to do. For their part, the Turks began insisting on some resolution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Since neither is likely to happen anytime soon, the deal—and the opportunity for a rapprochement—collapsed last spring.

A bridge between Turkey and Armenia actually does exist, though most of it has crumbled into the Akhuryan River, which cuts deeply through a gorge that serves as the border between the two countries. The Silk Road city of Ani stands abandoned along this part of the border, its mosques and churches intact after a thousand years, its bazaars echoing in a winter wind. Beyond an electric fence and across the river, Armenian guard towers keep watch over the ruins.

Some 50 miles north of Ani, Ustael's workers continue to dig 13 feet every day. Once completed, the tunnel will run for a mile and a half, 1,300 feet beneath the surface. It will be one of the longest in Turkey, Ustael says, and everyone will know his name. "Maybe then I can go work someplace warm."

Ustael spends his downtime in Kars, 42 miles south of the border, the two-hour drive made eventful by the slippery fact of coming down the mountain. Along icy roads, the car twists through slopeside villages, past minarets and the mud roofs of stone huts overgrown with grass. A vast westward migration of people in search of jobs has robbed these villages of all but the least mobile. Foxes forage at the roadside, headlights igniting their eyes.

In Kars, the site of great 19th-century battles between Ottoman Turks and Russians, the hilltop citadel remains. The women stay indoors. The men walk arm in arm down the streets, savoring a drink of raki in the saloons that exist in this region of lax Islam. Raki tastes like the anise-flavored pastis of France, but there is little European refinement in Kars. That could change when the BTK links this city to Baku, its wealthy antipode on the Caspian, injecting new revenue into the local economy. The governor of Kars, Ahmet Kara, talks of how the railroad will transform Kars into a city "important in the world's eyes." Behind Kara hangs a photo of Mustafa Kemal, or Atat�rk, the first president of Turkey, who turned the Ottoman Empire into a modern, secular state, encouraging Western ways and outlawing the fez.

With a knit cap on his head and bundled in a thick anorak, Ustael watches a drill needle the far wall of the tunnel, making small stones out of solid rock. A front loader strains up the tunnel's incline, its bucket carrying a ton of freshly dislodged stone. It emerges from the tunnel and rolls into the blizzard, driving past Ustael toward a waiting truck. He says he wants to contribute to modern Turkey, to help bridge East and West. When the dynamite arrives, he laughs when he sees that it was made in China; it has already crossed this border once before.

There will be no explosions today. The mountain rock is soft enough for the drill to do its work without dynamite. Ustael looks down the tunnel toward Georgia. "We haven't found gold yet," he jokes. The stones tumble from the front loader into the truck, the crash almost drowning out his voice. "The Silk Road will live again."

They're not hiring in Akhalkalaki. There's no gold here either. Not much glitters in the hardscrabble hills near this town in the Georgian south. This is where the old railroad from Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi terminates. Beginning here, 60 miles of new rail will be laid, running south through Ustael's mountain tunnel to Kars. Another 75 miles of existing rail will be rehabilitated. Work begins with the thaw.

Akhalkalaki is in Georgia, but most of its residents are ethnically Armenian—and desperately poor. The factories in Akhalkalaki were dismantled after the Soviet collapse, their components sold off in the new capitalism. Since the agricultural collectives shut down, once fertile lands have overgrown with weeds. Bandits clipped the aluminum wires and copper connectors that helped propel rail cars, selling the metal in Iran and Turkey. The economy took a big hit in 2007, when the Russians closed a military base here.

There is to work, so the men go to Moscow, where they step into the orange jumpsuits of the street cleaner, sending money back home. Many who have stayed feel neglected by the central Georgian government. Protests have been frequent. Very few people in Akhalkalaki and the surrounding Javakheti region speak Georgian, and in the schools there is no one to teach the language. During the 1990s the prospect loomed that Javakheti could be Georgia's next breakaway region, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the north, which declared independence in the early 1990s but remain largely unrecognized.

Now Georgia is counting on the BTK railway to boost economic activity and help integrate this turbulent Armenian enclave into the rest of the country. When plans to open the railway were first announced, Georgia's Armenians opposed its construction, citing the unfairness of its bypassing Armenia. But today in Akhalkalaki there is a small hope that the new railroad will alleviate this long postcommunist endurance.

Grigoriy Lazarev stands guard at Akhalkalaki's outdoor bazaar. He takes potatoes on consignment from a local farmer, barters them for mandarins, then sells the fruit at the bazaar for 40 tetri a kilo, or about ten cents a pound. He would like to work on the railroad. "I am a mechanic, a welder, a master engineer," he says. "Selling mandarins is not good for my psyche." He stands before a pile of fruit in the trunk of his green Moskvitch, looking left and right at the many others who also sell mandarins here. In Soviet days this street had order, Lazarev says. "But everybody became sellers." He is 58 years old, has only enough teeth to chew soft food like citrus fruit. He has two young children, and a few tetri jangle in his coat pocket.

When Lazarev drove two hours to the town of Kartsakhi to apply for work on the railroad, the contractors turned him away. He visited the camp forming on the outskirts of Akhalkalaki, where Turkish and Azerbaijani skilled workers will soon congregate. You cannot operate a Komatsu excavator, they said. You do not speak Georgian.

The ministers in Tbilisi say Akhalkalaki will be the site of a critical station on the Iron Silk Road, where trains will switch between European and Russian rail gauges. For people in Akhalkalaki, it is difficult to imagine how they will benefit. Like Lazarev, many hundreds of locals have petitioned for railroad work, yet such work remains elusive.

Conditions have improved since Mikheil Saakashvili assumed the Georgian presidency—people in Akhalkalaki will admit that. Under Eduard Shevardnadze, they had electricity only five hours a day—while they slept—long enough for bread to bake in time for morning. It was subsistence living: no TV, poor roads, little interaction with Tbilisi, and a rationing of the wood that fueled the house stoves that kept people from freezing in their beds. Now there are a few good roads and electricity all day, if not running water in every home. It is often cold in Akhalkalaki, even indoors, and the abiding stress makes the people wander these streets weakly, nothing like the powerful Narts, the fabled giants that inhabited the Caucasus before humans arrived and that inspired them to carve mountains into kingdoms and then into nations.

Just 19 years old as a nation, Georgia is struggling through its adolescence. Seven years ago the Rose Revolution engendered all manner of youthful aspiration. Membership in NATO. Inclusion in the European Union. Bringing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia under firm federal control. Reworking relations with Russia. Saakashvili wanted it all, wanted it quickly. If not for Georgia's northerly neighbor, he might have gotten it all.

The Russians have long felt a sense of entitlement toward Georgia, for they were the ones who folded Georgian nobility into their ranks during the 19th century, forming many principalities into a single governable entity, a Christian fortification in a region otherwise allied with the Ottomans or Persians. Russia also feels a deep emotional attachment to a land romanticized by Aleksandr Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. But benevolence is a matter of perspective. Soon after Alexander I attempted to adopt Georgia in 1801, the widowed Georgian queen greeted the tsar's envoy with a dagger in the side, killing him.

More recently tensions spiked as Russia, fed up with Georgia's Western desires, closed the border between the two countries in 2006. Russia worries that if Georgia gains entry to the Western institutions it so esteems, this could inspire similar freethinking in the northern Caucasus—including the Russian regions of Dagestan, Ingushetiya, and Chechnya—which continues to shudder with explosions and assassinations that threaten Moscow's territorial hold.

The long-running tensions between Russia and Georgia escalated into war in the summer of 2008. Russia moved to assert control over the breakaway regions. Its troops routed Georgia's army, and Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as new nations. It was a reminder that a small skirmish in these borderlands could spark a global showdown. Yet the EU and the U.S. were notably indisposed to intervene. Since the war, Georgia's pro-Western policy has stalled. Though the border between the two countries reopened last March, tensions are still high.

Like Prometheus, whom the gods chained to the Caucasus as punishment for giving humanity the power of fire, Georgia cannot escape its coordinates. Yet its position on the map may be its strongest asset. For NATO, the southern Caucasus is now viewed as a needed route for supplying the war in Afghanistan, ever since terrorist attacks in November 2008 began threatening the supply route through Pakistan's Khyber Pass. For Turkey, an important trade partner, Georgia is the gate to Central Asia. Armenia and Russia cannot trade with each other without going through Georgia. And Azerbaijani oil cannot reach the Mediterranean without passing through Georgia, earning the country $65 million in annual transit fees.

Georgia is a small player at the table, left to stack small chips. Indeed, the most significant impact of the Iron Silk Road on Georgia may prove to be the dismay it will create in the Black Sea ports of Batumi and Poti, the country's most dynamic economic centers, once freight can be diverted to Turkey instead. Still, Georgia can hope that if there's another conflict with Russia, European countries will cry foul if their trade through the southern Caucasus is disrupted.

In Akhalkalaki, Grigoriy Lazarev packs up his scale and its rusted one- and five-kilogram weights, and slowly walks away from the bazaar. He passes a funeral procession running along the main thoroughfare, a photo of the deceased man affixed to the windshield of a sedan. Arms linked, men walk up the mud of the street, women up the mud of the sidewalk.

Lazarev's small house was built in 1850, in the time of hard-willed Nicholas I. The roof leans severely, threatening to cave. Lazarev cannot pay to fix it. He and his family live off his mother's 90-lari (about $50) monthly pension. Still, when they have guests, Lazarev's wife, Liza, busies herself setting the table with what food they possess. A daughter, Gohar, sits at an old upright piano and practices her lessons, filling the small room with music and missteps. Lazarev grieves over his bad luck with the railroad and more generally, but not so loudly that his family will hear.

He rummages through a wardrobe and returns to the table. In his hand is a felt-backed shoulder board, its green fabric faded nearly to gray. It is the emblem of a lieutenant, an engineer with the Russian border service. "My grandfather served under Nicholas II," Lazarev says. "He built roads to Akhaltsikhe and Batumi." Lazarev smiles, a rare incident, and then the room goes dark. The electricity has gone out in Akhalkalaki, and the Lazarevs fall silent, but for the sound of the old piano.

It is electricity that initially impresses in Baku, its roadway lamps gilding the new asphalt from airport to city. Baku no longer supplies half the world's petroleum needs, as it did at the opening of the 20th century. But it feels like it does. In the past three years all manner of luxe stores have opened along the boulevard Neftchiler Prospekti, their windows reflecting the Caspian waters. Plans are progressing on a $4.5-billion, carbon-neutral resort on Zira Island, in the bay beyond the city. A Four Seasons Hotel will open shortly to house the guests drawn to Baku by the wealth of the state oil monopoly, located across the street. In the five years since the BTC pipeline began pumping oil out of the Caspian and money into Baku, Azerbaijan's economy has grown by more than 100 percent.

In the years after the former Turkish president, Süleyman Demirel, broached the topic of the Iron Silk Road in a Tbilisi speech in the late 1990s, the parties involved attempted to secure international funding for its construction. But the Armenian diaspora blocked all financing efforts, arguing convincingly that the routing of the railroad, like that of the oil pipeline before it, was a punitive gesture linked to Nagorno-Karabakh. Washington, the EU, and the World Bank stayed away. When the oil spigot turned on in 2005, briefly making Azerbaijan the world's fastest growing economy, the hesitance of international financiers no longer mattered. Azerbaijan can now afford its own portion of the railroad, upgrading 313 miles of outdated lines to the Georgian border. It is also loaning Georgia a few hundred million dollars for its section on neighborly terms—25 years at one percent annually. Magnanimity is a pleasure of abundance.

No train passed through Musa Panahov's hometown in the Azerbaijani west, so he went out looking for one. He graduated from the Moscow Transportation Institute during the time of Leonid Brezhnev, then joined the Soviet railroad fraternity. The Soviet Union administered the world's largest, by volume, rail system; all strategic goods were transported by train. This centrally commanded network was a key part of the national security infrastructure, protected and privileged. Train employees had their own separate hospitals, their own schools, even their own militia. "We had everything except a foreign ministry," says Panahov, now Azerbaijan's deputy minister of transport.

Railroads are less important in Azerbaijan today. Oil and gas predominate, according to the plan of the late Heydar Aliyev, the country's third president and primary citizen, who by force of will forged Azerbaijan into what it is today: the relatively secure, relatively independent economic dictator of the region. Aliyev possessed the foresight to invite foreign firms to cooperate in Caspian development, and he understood the importance of the Iron Silk Road. Panahov is the man laying another plank in Aliyev's plan for Azerbaijanis' continued independence.

Panahov, 51, unrolls a map of the southern Caucasus across a table in his office and slowly runs his fingers from east to west, from sea to sea. At this table he negotiated with transport ministers from Georgia and Turkey in discussions that lasted until early in the morning. Cherubic but with graying hair, he speaks in a soft voice as he delineates the numbers. Total length of the Iron Silk Road: 500 miles. Total annual cargo capacity: 25 million tons. He speaks of the Azerbaijanis who fled to Turkey to escape communism. "It gives me a sense of happiness to connect brothers again," he says.

Azerbaijan became a Muslim parliamentary republic in 1918 and enjoyed that status for a cou­ple of years. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, little about Azerbaijan is visibly Muslim or parliamentarian. It is difficult to locate a minaret or an honest vote in Baku, less so a Bentley. Prosperity and social equality need not be strangers, but when a country has oil, it is tempting to focus on the former at the expense of the latter. More tempting still when the world needs what it has to give. The BTC is the only pipeline that delivers non-Russian, non-OPEC, non-Arabic oil to Mediterranean tankers. With the global oil supply diminishing, Azerbaijani influence has only risen.

Social justice is not a topic of public debate in Azerbaijan. More important to those in power is the fact that this small nation has managed to survive—and now thrive—in a difficult neighborhood. As one official said, "The optimists live in Georgia, the people who are complaining all the time live in Armenia, but the realists live in Azerbaijan."

Or rather in Baku. A short ride on the existing rail leading northwest from the capital reveals not political realists but reality itself, the hovels that house those who have not felt the benefits of Baku's oil boom. A quarter of Azerbaijanis live below the poverty line.

These train cars retain the cracked gloss of Soviet adornment, frills and curtains that are rough to the touch, landscape paintings that hang in the spaces between the windows. A sorority of railway workers in starched uniforms tends to the train as it rolls through a world cleanly separated from Bakuvian luxury. One woman shovels coal into a furnace that heats the car's interior.

Musa Panahov knows these trains, knows they do not rival their German, Japanese, or American counterparts. He is a railway man in an oil country. "But oil and gas will end someday," he says, smiling. "The railroad will live always." 

Brett Forrest reports frequently from the former Soviet Union. Photographer Alex Webb’s most recent book is Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names.

PHOTOESSAY: The Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus (motherjones.com)

(motherjones.com) Civilians and soldiers alike navigate a region torn apart by years of war.


19 Photos by Karen Mirzoyan/Magnum Foundation 
Text by Hannah Levintova


magnumfoundation.org


Five months ago, the people of South Ossetia, a Georgian breakaway province, cast votes for their next president. Russia—the territory's controlling nation—had endorsed a candidate, but the majority went instead to former education minister (and anti-corruption advocate) Alla Dzhioeva. But her presidency was short-lived: The Supreme Court declared the election invalid, citing polling violations, and set a do-over election date—from which Dzhioeva was barred from participating. This week, Leonid Tibilov, a former KGB agent, won the new election.

South Ossetia is one of three contested republics in the Caucasus region. Its election chaos illustrates the impasse faced by these territories: All are trying to form autonomous nations, yet they can't build government without a stamp of approval from one of the only countries in the world that recognizes their nationhood. Their independence depends on Russia's support.

The Caucasus region, which straddles the Europe/Asia border, houses a medley of religions and ethnicities, from the Indo-European Ossetians to the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azerbaijanis. During the USSR era, all that barely mattered; the Soviet identity subsumed regional and sectarian differences. But since the Soviet Union's fall in 1991, rival factions, finally able to assert their singularity, have clashed over competing claims to overlapping homelands.

The first to rise up was Nagorno-Karabakh. The Azerbaijani territory, which is populated largely by Armenians, declared its independence in the thick of the USSR's December 1991 dissolution. A few months later, South Ossetia—where several Indo-Iranian dialects are spoken—won partial autonomy from Georgia in a bloody war. And they prevailed mostly because Georgia was distracted by the separatist movement in Abkhazia, another breakaway province, which gained independence in a 1992 conflict that claimed nearly 10,000 lives and displaced a quarter million people.

Today, these territories exist in a legal no-man's land, largely unrecognized by other nations, and often dependent on neighboring states, primarily Russia, for survival. Over two decades, they've balanced self-protection with haphazard nation-building. Armed clashes with anti-secessionist forces are frequent, though rarely publicized in Western media.

Photographer Karen Mirzoyan spent three years exploring these territories, to expose and understand their singular struggles.

"My aim was to document the transitional state of these unrecognized republics in the region," he explains. "In the beginning, my task seemed simple. What I did not take into account was that over a period of three years, not only my story, but my way of seeing, was subject to transformation." He continues:

Most frequently I was simply sitting with people over a table, drinking, sharing food and the stories of our lives. I often told them about my family, my aspirations, of my upcoming wedding…in return, they loved and understood me as much as I'd come to love and understand them.

I did not want to compromise a single detail, the smallest nuance of the stories shared for the privilege of turning on a microphone, reaching for my camera or even taking out a pen. So, I was not working, I was not acting as a photojournalist…because when interaction is so warm and intimate, I feel it would be unfair to just take these heart-told stories and package them for retail.

Nevertheless, Mirzoyan did take occasional photographs. But he didn't depend on them: Mirzoyan also recorded sounds, wrote in notebooks, or sketched subjects who didn't want to be photographed. "I confess to photography being my excuse, my rationalization for these repeated trips," he explains. "[But] my aim is not to document. I just wanted to see for myself, to listen and understand."

This slideshow presents an excerpt of Mirzoyan's attempt at understanding life in the Caucasus' transitional pockets.

ART: Tbilisi Photo Festival 2011 25-31 May (europeanweek.ge)

Europe House Georgia and Tbilisi Photography House are pleased to organize the second annual Tbilisi Photo Festival which will take place during European Week in Georgia from 25-31 May 2011.

A contributing partner is the Arles Photo Festival (Les Rencontres Photographiques d'Arles) whose program, La Nuit de l'Année, will be presented on May 28 during the open air screenings in Old Tbilisi and includes the productions of leading p...hoto-agencies, newspapers, news agencies and magazines.

In addition, A Night of Photography - Tbilisi Photo Festival night screenings program - will present the works of various Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Russian, Turkish and Iranian photographers. As well as the LAF PROJECT and OSI Documentary photography program winners…

The Tbilisi Photo Festival is also pleased to host the following four exhibitions during European Week:

- KAVKAZ, by Thomas Dworzak, a member of the Magnum Agency

-CHANGES, a collection of images describing the events of the Egyptian, Tunisian, Georgian, Kyrgyz and Ukrainian revolutions by the leading photo-reporters – Alex Majoli, Yuri Kozyrev, Dominic Nahr, Lionel Charrier, Julien Daniel, Guillaume Binet, Justyna Mielnikiewicz...

- EXPLICATIONS - Modern Georgian Photography, a selection of images from the second part of 20th century until present

-DMITRY ERMAKOV COLLECION Georgian Photography of the end of 19th century - a selection of images of the collection Dmitry Ermakov, one of the pioneers of photography in Georgia.

The Georgian Museum of History and TBILISI PHOTO FESTIVAL are pleased to present this collection to a public audience for the first time ever.

+++

PRESS RELEASE

Following the success of the first Tbilisi Photo Festival which gathered 15,000 people in May
2010, the capital of Georgia is pleased to welcome this second edition. The festival will be held between 25 and 31 May 2011.

During the 'Night of Photography', on May 28 a Caucasian version of the Nuit de l'Année of
the Arles photography festival, ten screens will once again be set up in the streets and squares
of Tbilisi’s old town, showcasing the work of the greatest photographic associations, agencies, magazines and publications (AFP, Liberation, Noor, Reuters, MYOP, VII, etc.) from dusk to dawn.
But since Tbilisi is at the heart of the Caucasus,

at the point where the culture ofTurkey, Iran, Russia and other European countries meet, the city aims to be a space where young photographers from this diverse yet interlinked world will converge. The Festival’s screens will therefore also present – in between the work of the great names of photography – the images of many young photographers from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkey, Iran..

The Photo Festival, an event jointly organised by Tbilisi Photography House and by Europe House georgia, will be part of the ‘European Week’ in Tbilisi. Europe house is foundation which aims to promote European values and culture in Georgia.

Four exhibitions will also attempt to illustrate the Caucasus as a meeting-point of different worlds which became intertwined with a Europe whose modernity was revealed to it in the 'click' of a camera shutter

Georgia at the Crossroads of Modernity – The XIXth-Century’s Ermakov Collection

A selection of images from the collection of Dimitri Ermakov (1848-1916) will be shown for the first time. Having only just finished restoring them to their former glory, Tbilisi's History Museum has lent a series of images taken by this pioneer of photography in the Caucasus to the organizers of the Tbilisi Photo Festival: pictures documenting the construction of the South Caucasus railway, portraits of members of the Georgian aristocracy, images of the art of bathing in Tbi l isi 's sulphur baths,
mountainous landscapes, pictures of Tbilisi and Batumi whose subtle charms are heightened by their mixture of the oriental and the European...

Changes

The Arab Spring of 2011, the coloured revolutions of the former Soviet Union... a world in revolt. This group exhibition, organised in partnership with the young and promising Parisian gallery La Petite Poule Noire, brings together the work of photographers who witnessed these dramatic events – from
Belgrade to Bishkek, Tbilisi to Tunis, via Kiev to Cairo. Alex Majoli, Dominic Nahr, Thomas Dworzak (Magnum), Yuri Kozyrev (Noor), Lionel Charrier, Julien Daniel and Guillaume Binet (MYOP), Justyna Mielnikiewicz...

Kavkaz by Thomas Dworzak

The famous Magnum photographer will present us with the first complete exhibition of his work, taken from his book Kavkaz. 'During the spring of 1993, I decided to live in Tbilisi for a few months before returning to university. It was then that I discovered the cultures of the Caucasus. Hospitality, the beauty of languages, the unbelievable speed of change during the post-Soviet period, war and conflict, courage and cruelty'

This German photographer – known for his brave work during the brutal wars in Chechnya – will show us 80 of his black-and-white photographs of the noisy and furious Caucasus which he captured with his lens.

Georgia - New Generation

Some began to take photographs during the Soviet Union, and others began later... but from the early 1990s onwards all of them devoted themselves body and soul to their art. This exhibition will introduce us to the work of the masters of modern photography such as Yuri Mechitov – who produced a series of portraits of film director Sergei Parajanov, Guram Tsibakhashvili and his Explanations – as well as to the images of young photographers such as Beso Uznadze, David Meskhi and Marika Asatiani, whose work is beginning to charm the European photography world. The highlight of this exhibition? A wonderful series of photographs produced by a real self-taught photographer named Shalva Alkhanaidze.

Lectures and discussions will also be held during this European Week in Tbilisi. Politicians and artists alike will share their visions of Europe, of its ties with Georgia and of the dramatic events which are shaping our world in the XXIst century.

Programme: www.europeanweek.ge

Curators
Lionel Charrier and Nestan Nijaradzé
in France
l.charrier@europehousegeorgia.org / + 33 679331460
in Georgia :
nijaradzenestan@hotmail.com / +995 99559592

Coordinator
Irma Inaridzé
inaridze@hotmail.com /+ 995 99 22 32 95

Contact press
in France
Charles van den Boogaerd,
charles@noecom.com / +33 6 31 17 65 69
in Georgia
Irma Inaridzé
inaridze@hotmail.com /+ 995 99 22 32 95

Logo for Tbilisi photo festival: © Zango Design

CALL: The Magnum Foundation Announces 2011 Young Photographer in the Caucasus Award Now Open for Submissions (magnumfoundation.org)

Eligibility
The Award program is open to all photographers born after January 1, 1973, living in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Republics of the North Caucasus in the Russian Federation (Daghestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North-Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karatshaevo-Tsherkessia, and Adigey Republic) and the Russian Federation regions of Stavropol Krai and Krasnodar. Existing United Nations standards on nationality and borders will be utilized for purposes of determining eligibility.


Submission Requirements
Applicants must submit up to twenty (20) images from a single documentary project situated in the Caucasus (as described above) in digital format, together with a one-page written statement (in English, French, or Russian) describing the project and providing a short biography and the contact information of the photographer.


• Images must be uploaded onto The Photoshelter Site at caucasusaward.photoshelter.com

(Once you sign up, your upload instructions will be emailed to you).
• Please submit images only. Do not submit images in a movie, multimedia or slideshow format.

• Image resolution must be 100 dpi and cannot exceed 1000 pixels on the longest side.

• Images should be numbered in the order that you wish them to be presented (to ensure correct sequencing please use two digits), followed by the applicant’s last name. Do not use any spacing in the file names. For example, John Smith’s images should be numbered 01Smith, 02Smith, 03Smith, etc.

• Please be sure that your written statement includes your biography (including professional affiliation, if any) and current contact information, including telephone number and email address, as well as a description of the submitted project.


The Magnum Foundation reserves the right not to consider any submission not meeting the requirements listed above. Only submissions uploaded onto the Photoshelter site will be reviewed. The Foundation will not review hard copies.


Judging

A short-list of entries will be reviewed by a jury composed of the members of Magnum Photos in late June 2011. The jury will propose a winner and possibly up to two honorable mentions to be confirmed by the Board of Directors of the Magnum Foundation. The winner and honorable mention recipients will be notified by the Magnum Foundation by telephone or email and will be publicly announced by July 1st. The selection of the winner and honorable mention recipients shall be made in the sole and absolute discretion of the jury and the Foundation.

In addition to the $5000 prize to support an ongoing documentary project, the winner will receive a statue presented by a Magnum photographer at an awards ceremony held in Tbilisi, Georgia. The portfolios submitted by the winner and honorable mention recipients will also be featured on the Magnum Foundation’s website.


Terms and Conditions

All applicants represent and warrant that they are the sole authors of the works submitted and that there is no legal or other impediment to making the submission or granting the licenses described herein. Applicants agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Magnum Foundation from and against any claim arising from a breach of the foregoing representation and warranty or from any allegation that submitted materials violate the rights of any third party, including by copyright infringement, defamation, breach of contract, or invasion of privacy


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