"A picture has no
meaning at all if it
can't tell a story."
-Eetu Silanpa
My personal belief about what makes a good photo is congruent with this quote, a good picture must tell a story, it must make you want to read the article, it must make you feel something.
A photojournalist who's work I especially enjoy is that of Dutch, Rob Hornstra. The following article focuses on the lost land of Abkhazia, a small Soviet town destroyed by war and subsequent poverty.
http://www.foto8.com/new/online/photo-stories/1550-empty-land-promised-land-forbidden-land Below are just a few of the accompanying pictures:
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| Paradise lost is how many Georgians and Russians refer to this small coastal area on the Black Sea. It is just one hour’s drive from the capital Sukhumi to the Russian border. An hour to the south and you are in Georgia. That’s how small Abkhazia is. But with its deep-sea harbor, stone quarries, and a strategic location along the Caucasus, this area is worth fighting for. In a short but bloody war in 1992 and 1993, the Georgians lost their favorite subtropical province and the Russians their most exclusive holiday paradise. Abkhazia has been a pariah since the war. But for the victorious Abkhazians, fifteen years on their paradise is little more than hell. |
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| Andrei sits on the edge of a narrow bed. Sitting causes him obvious pain. He is from the first generation of young people who, in the middle of the nineteen nineties, started using drugs en masse. His sister is also an addict and she also has AIDS. The boy who just opened the door is her son, Andrei’s nephew. The house is a gathering place for drug addicts. In exchange for a few daily fixes, Andrei’s buddies are allowed to use the flat. Andrei is suffering from an open form of resistant TB. Just to be safe, we put on surgical masks. Lena doesn’t, as a form of respect. She’s known Andrei since she was a child. She asks him how he is and then leaves us alone. She has to go back to the street. Six weeks after our visit we call Lena to find out how Andrei is. We are just too late; Andrei died two days earlier. Andrei deteriorated rapidly. They let him lie for increasingly long periods, always on his least painful hip, with his face to the wall, as he slipped away in a feverish sleep. He continued using right up to the very end, even though injecting became harder and harder. They just put the needle in his wasted upper arm. This whole time no doctor had paid a visit. One day, Andrei’s hand hung limply over the edge of the bed. Through Lena they called a nurse. She told them: “Just call an ambulance,” and they had carried him out of the flat and driven him to the tuberculosis clinic. The next morning Andrei was dead. |
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| Children’s home number one is clean and tidy. In Russia it is relatively easy to take your baby to a children’s home, but it does require you to relinquish all your rights. In many cases, it is drug or alcohol addicts who bring in their babies. This infuriates the director. She calls some mothers conveyor belt mothers. “They should sterilize them. What kind of mothers are they? They keep drinking and taking drugs, even when they’re pregnant,” she says. These children exhibit serious deficiencies. “This little baby came in three days ago and is already my favorite. She is a very happy baby, very bright.” She will stay here for four years before she has to move to a home for older children. The director tries not to think about it. |
Hornstra's pictures convey the most dire sense of hopeless desolation, a stagnant town within the heart of Soviet Russia; forgotten and ignored. Stories like this, ones of which enlighten and promote action, are my favourite.
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