PHOTOGRAPHY. Natela Grigalashvili’s Georgia by Nathan Thornburgh (roadsandkingdoms.com)

(roadsandkingdoms.com) The Georgians, while famously expansive as hosts, also have ancient customs that no man wants to cross. A wiry, smiling Georgian explained this on the first day of my first visit ever to the country years ago: “For example,” he said, “if you said something bad about my sister, I would have to kill you. Or at least try. I don’t know if I could kill you, but I would definitely try.” 
 

And yet there is an unalloyed charm to these customs. Georgia, for all its faults and sorrows, has kept its culture alive, in part because of the vibrant and intact agrarian life that is the heart of Georgia. That’s why Europeans and Americans who visit Georgia often fall so deeply for the place: its rural traditions remind us of who we used to be.

Very few photographers out there tell the story of rural Georgia in as raw and intimate a way as Natela Grigalashvili. She is from the countryside herself, and after a pioneering start as the first female photojournalist in post-Soviet Georgia, she has turned her eye toward the villages. Her stunning new project is called Georgian ABC, and she is currently funding it on Kisskissbankbank, a European Kickstarter of sorts. Go pitch in your bit there. It’s a book that deserves to be published.

I was honored to have the chance to speak with Grigalashvili from Tbilisi on Skype recently. Here is our conversation, only lightly redacted: roadsandkingdoms.com/2013/grigalashvili



Georgian ABC book from Natela Grigalashvili on Vimeo.

more links:
Homepage: www.natelagrigalashvili.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Natela Grigalashvili
instagram.com/Natela Ggrigalashvili
www.freundevonfreunden.com/Natela Grigalashvili
ProjectArtBeat - Georgian photographer Natela Grigalashvili
The Doukhobors' Land (thequietamerican.org)
Natela Grigalashvili’s “Ethnic Minorities in Georgia” exhibited in Flensburg
The Aftermath Project.org: Refugees Georgian Villages
Georgian photographer captures life at troubled Iraq-Iran border

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.

+++

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

+++

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’. 

+++

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

+++

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. 

+++

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

+++

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.

+++

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

+++

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.

+++

"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."

+++

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.

ESSENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY: The Tbilisi Photo Festival. By Nathan Thornburgh (roadsandkingdoms.com)

Photo: A Salafi woman with a child, met in the street. Dagestan.Photo by: Maria Turchenkova, Hidden War in the Land of Mountains

(roadsandkingdoms.com) Tbilisi, hillbound city of stone bridges and medieval churches, has alsobecome in recent years a city of photography, a place that some of the best photographers in the world call home. This is partially a fault of geography: it is nestled between the ever-wars of the north Caucasus and the intrigues of Iran, not far from Iraq or Afghanistan. There are additional benefits for photojournalists: low rents, a strong local grappa called chacha, and the ability to smoke almost anywhere at anytime.

But any conversation about why Tbilisi is known for photography should start with Nestan Nijaradze and the Tbilisi Photo Festival that she helps run. Nestan is one of the last true muses of this earth: descendant of Imeretian aristocracy, educated in Paris, ardent defender of humanist Georgia. She has been Artistic Co-Director of the festival from the beginning, and it has always been beautiful, always a crossroad of east and west and north and south. This year it features the kind of brave work it always has—not least the North Caucasus projects shown below. But the 2013 festival, which starts May 28, is more than exposition this year, more than education. This year it’s a referendum on the soul of Georgia.

Here’s why: On May 17, a small silent protest in support of anti-homophobia groups took place as planned in the center of Tbilisi. It was met by a mob of thousands, egged on by Orthodox Christian priests baying for violence. The crowd overwhelmed police lines, attacked the peaceful protesters and, when they were being evacuated, savaged the buses with stones and bricks and bottles. It was a minor miracle that no one died. But the notion that some of us have, that Tbilisi can be a city of both tradition and tolerance, suffered a terrible blow.

I reached Nestan at home in Tbilisi over the weekend.

Roads & Kingdoms: What the hell happened on May 17? 

Nestan Nijaradze: We were expecting that one day there would be something like this, that the church would take control of the crowd. We saw terrible scenes—people beating each other, and priests encouraging it. There were priests running in the streets, battling, with chairs in their hands.

Yesterday there was another protest, and again this violence. We were a thousand people, not more. But of course we have to continue. It’s very possible that this would become a radical orthodox country.

R&K: What were they saying as all this was happening?

NN: They were saying, you have sold our country, our traditions. There were saying, you are all—I only know how to say it in French—enculé, fucked in the ass.

But there were also heterosexual people like I am, and we were like, sorry, we are very banal.

R&K: The open-air “night of photography” is a big part of your festival, and it’s on the street. Is that going to change?

NN: We are doing still photo night, still with the Arles Festival, our partner from the beginning.

During this one night in old Tbilisi, we bring in the whole world. We have around 10,000 people who come to this event. The program is already closed, it’s edited. But yesterday morning I got a call from a Georgian magazine, and they asked if they can give us photos from May 17. And of course, we’ll find room. We’ll be able to show this thing to a huge public.

R&K: What’s the value, in times like this, of having a photo festival?

NN: We don’t have a photo festival just to have a photo festival. We want to make the public more mature; to give a larger vision of modernity and the modern world, what’s going on, in Georgia, in the region, the Caucasus, the larger region from Iran and Afghanistan, or Europe; to show it’s not only Georgia, there are not only our own problems. The modern world is a huge structure with a very, very complicated reality. We want to bring it here.

We want to do this through the best photographers, but also through the emerging photographers we find in every corner here when we go looking. There is a group of female photographers who are bringing very interesting work from the north Caucasus. A group of Ukrainians working on Chernobyl. Georgians, Azeris, Armenians. Kurdish Iraqi slideshows on Kirkuk ten years after the invasion and petrol smugglers on the border. Also huge maps of the countries that we put in the program.

R&K: Are you afraid of being targeted?

NN: You know, it’s always possible. We have a transgender series. One by [NOOR photographer] Pep Bonet, another by a young French photographer.

We are expecting of course, that there might be a reaction. We are ready for that, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to cancel the exhibition because of crazy priests running through the street encouraging absolutely stupid young men to beat others.

It’s very important to show the reality of [sexual minorities]. For transsexuals, they’re making this decision that are obliged to be in the sex industry, because it’s the only way for them to continue to exist.

We are not a human rights organization. But we are trying to focus on these stories.

Some of the work is about nightlife and prostitution and drugs, but it’s also about the violence of the world these people are living in. It’s about the economic condition, and how they suffer. The job is to bring this world to this public that suffers from a narrow vision of reality, that has no wish to understand that the modern world is much more complicated and scary.

R&K: Have you talked directly with church leaders about this?

NN: No, no, no. We are trying to be smart. The problem of May 17, first of all, was that all Georgia media was presenting the wrong idea, that the protest was going to be a gay pride parade. It wasn’t: it was a silent march in support of the organizations that protect the rights of sexual minorities. But all the press, during ten days beforehand, they were saying gaypride gaypride gaypride.

We are not looking for any scandals. Even in the titles we put on the show, they are not so easily understood as being about transsexuals, for example. It’s not because we want to complicate it. We are spreading the info without making any big stories about what we’re going to do.

We are ready for anything. But if we think too much about it, it will be impossible to continue. And we have to continue. The festival is just days away.

R&K: Tell me about this work on the North Caucasus in the festival.

NN: We have a few traditions for the festival that we try to maintain from the very beginning. One of them is to try to always show something on the Caucasus. It attracts international public, international media and it’s a chance to show more about the region where Georgia is located. Not just the South Caucasus, but the North, because it’s very important for us, historically.

So in the past we’ve had [Thomas] Dworzak on the Kavkaz, and [Stanley] Greene on Chechnya.

It’s also a tradition to show one country through the work of young photographers. It’s a very interesting trick to show a country through photography. This year’s festival starts a few months before the Sochi Olympics, and Sochi was very political from the beginning, especially for us. So we were thinking okay, why not give the place and space to this huge international event? At the same time, we know what is going on around Sochi, how far it is from the glamour place of winter skiing.

It raises the question: does the larger public know that the Winter Olympics will be held in a very complicated region that still has great risks?

The images are also very interesting, because you see for the last four or five years, the North Caucasus is mostly photographed by Russian photographers. So our shows from the North Caucasus are all Russian photographers, except for Andrea Bruce in Ingushetia.

There are new names, like Maria Turchenkova with her Dagestan work, and Maria Plotnikova in Sochi, and Grozny Nine Cities, which is a joint project of three young photojournalists: Olga Kravets, Maria Morina, and Oksana Yushko. We see the Grozny and Chechnya that pretends to be in normal life, but of course, there’s more to the story.

And, because of the Sochi connection, we decided to include the Sochi Project; they will make a presentation.

R&K: There’s also been a change in government in Georgia since the last festival. The government is a major sponsor. Has that hurt the festival?

NN: You know, it’s incredible timing. It was a really hard year. All the people we were partnering with in government changed. The people in City Hall changed, but they are still supporting us. We never deal directly with the government. Nobody ever asked us what we are doing. Nobody touches us. Nobody asks. They know we’re doing things at a very high level.

This year was the hardest one. But we are doing it, and we are convinced that this is the most important one yet.

[Top image by Oksana Yushko from Grozny Nine Cities]

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.

facebook: facebook.com