Victoria Ivleva is a photographer and journalist, born in 1956 in Leningrad. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. She worked for many years at Novaya Gazeta, her works were published in Ogonyok, Moscow News, German Spiegel, French Figaro, English Guardian, American The New York Times and other publications. In the late 80s - early 90s she filmed in almost all the hot spots of the disintegrating USSR. She worked a lot in African countries, helping various international humanitarian missions. In 1991, she filmed the report “Inside Chernobyl,” becoming the only journalist to visit the reactor, and then the only Russian woman to receive the highest World Press Photo Golden Eye award. She was awarded the prize of the Union of Journalists of Russia (2007) and the German Gerd Bucerius Prize (2008). Ivleva’s personal exhibition “The Apotheosis of War” was held at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2005), and “27 Photographs” was held in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod (2010). Photo album Temps Present de la Russie (France, 1988). Equipment: Nikon F4 and Nikon D3.
(Total 21 photos)
1. View of Maly Golovin Lane
2. Paveletsky Station Square and Valentin Serov’s painting “Girl with Peaches”
3. Moscow bakery "Moskvorechye"
5. Moscow bakery "Moskvorechye"
6. Car wash on Krasnoproletarskaya street. Night shift
7. A girl reading in the metro on Arbatskaya
8. Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in Cheryomushki
9. Last subway train. Sokolnicheskaya line
10. View from the window in the rain
11. Esquire fan at home on Kostyansky Lane
13. Metro station "Mezhdunarodnaya"
14. A girl in a subway car at the Lenin Library station
15. Dog on the playground. Nezhinskaya street
16. Man in a subway car
At the request of Bird In Flight, Russian photographer Victoria Ivleva chose 10 of her favorite photographs and talked about each one.
Victoria Ivleva
Russian photographer and correspondent. Born in Leningrad, lives in Moscow. Graduate of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. She has worked in many hot spots around the world, collaborates with Russian and foreign publications, and is the winner of the Golden Eye Award from World Press Photo for filming inside the destroyed reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, as well as the German Gerd Bucerius Prize.
I can’t call the photo of a woman in a pool of blood my favorite. I'll call it scary. Stunning. Anti-war icon. This is that very third-party victim - a beautiful young thin-legged woman who tried to escape from the war and in a hurry put on different slippers. There was no escape. It turned out to make a symbol out of it. It was with this photo that I went to the Peace March in Moscow in the spring of 2014.
There is only one frame on the film, there are no repetitions or variations - the people I was with did not want me to photograph the dead. It happened in the late 1980s during one of the wars in a collapsing empire.
I don't crop pictures, this is the only one. These are three young mothers imprisoned for drug trafficking. The children were already born in the zone, they live there separately: mothers - in the barracks, children - in the orphanage, mothers are only allowed to come and feed them. Women and children behind bars are a separate topic that I have been photographing for many years. It's mostly hard shooting. But here it’s just the opposite - the soft lines turned out to be so amazing. I had been waiting for this moment for a long time, and I managed to capture the beauty and vulnerability. This work resembles some kind of fresco.
This is a photo from my first trip to Africa in 1994. I was in Rwanda, where there was a war, and in Zaire, a neighboring country - more than a million refugees from Rwanda had accumulated there, and there was a terrible problem with water. This photo is from my trip to fetch water. I walked alone with a whole crowd of refugees with canisters. A successful composition, and, of course, an excellent blurred woman in the foreground - conveys the heaviness of the burden and at the same time the surprise of meeting me, a white man. It doesn't happen often that there are different emotions in one frame.
Sometimes I ask people to whom I show this photograph: what city do they think this was taken in? And almost everyone says: Paris! That's right, this is Paris, a Russian emigrant named Olga and her dog - a very stupid Russian greyhound. I'm pleased that the photo creates such a Parisian feeling. I think this is thanks to the excellent lighting coming from the balcony door, and Olga’s amazing outfit, and her pose. I like the two diagonal stripes - the hand in the shadow and the dog's face, they work well together. This photo is from my first trip to Paris in 1988. This was actually my first trip abroad, and all the memories of it are as beautiful as this photo.
Afghanistan. A former Soviet military airbase in the northern city of Kunduz. The children are Tajik refugees who had to leave Tajikistan during the civil war in the early 1990s.
For some reason, few people in the world were interested in this war and the fate of the Tajiks; during several trips to Tajikistan and Afghanistan, I did not meet a single journalist or photographer in the refugee camps. This little-known war remains so to this day, alas.
Refugees settled everywhere - even in the former city prison, all the cells were filled with them. The Afghans fed them - rich local merchants gave them rice. The Soviet air base in Kunduz was also completely filled. I think it was especially difficult for the children there; no one paid any attention to them at all, and I was great entertainment for them. Then, at my request, they climbed onto abandoned Soviet military vehicles on which clothes were drying, and I took several photographs.
This is also Afghanistan. And also Tajiks. Or rather, Tajik women who came to their friend’s funeral. People often ask me how I was even allowed to film in refugee camps. To be honest, such a question never arose - people saw in me a person who sympathizes with their grief and who stands on an equal footing with them. Being on an equal footing is generally an important quality for any journalist. The photograph has a striking light that permeates it all, intensified by the whiteness of the mourning scarves. I like the faces of women united by common grief. Vsevolod Sergeevich Tarasevich, an outstanding Soviet photographer, with whom I was friends in the last years of his life, once told me: “Photography should be interesting to look at!” I think that this photograph is interesting to look at leisurely and think about the meaning or meaninglessness of life.
The boy with the Kalashnikov is my friend, and maybe this friendship is the best thing I have done in my life. The story of this boy is a story about how to make anyone, even the most desperate person, believe in good things. We met him at a rehabilitation center for child soldiers in northern Uganda.
He was 15 years old, and he spent six months in the terrible children's army. This was his first day of freedom.
He told me he wanted to become a doctor. I helped him go to school and continue his studies. He turned out to be a good student. And then my friends and I helped him a little more, and he came to Russia to study as a doctor. Now he is in his third year at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. Came to chat with me the other day. The Kalashnikov in the picture is the same one with which he ran away from the bandits. But in recent years he has only held a pen in his hands. I am very glad that I have something to do with this and that what was planned in the jungle came true.
This is also Africa, but a completely different part of it. Sudan, Darfur province. I was there with the Red Cross food convoy, we fed twelve and a half thousand people. And it was a feeling of incredible happiness. And I like photography for its multi-layered nature, there are so many different plans, so many different stories: about trees, camels, Bedouins, women and bags of grain. I also like it with its soft shimmer of different shades of gray and clear figures separated from each other. A little like Bruegel. Only in Africa.
One can only kindly envy the energy, courage and “inner drive” of photojournalist Victoria Ivleva and admire her hard work and dedication. She always works independently (with the exception of eight years of cooperation with Novaya Gazeta) and fearlessly travels to hot spots and places of acute social conflicts. She was and to this day remains the only photojournalist who entered the fourth block of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the accident. For a series of photographs in the Chernobyl reactor, the author was awarded the highest World Press Photo Golden Eye award. Apart from her, none of the female photographers in Russia received it.
In addition to this achievement, the photojournalist was awarded awards from the Russian Union of Journalists, the Gerd Bucerius Prize and the Academician Sakharov Prize. Her works were published by all the major publications of the USSR, Russia and the world - from Ogonyok to the Guardian and The New York Times. Ivleva is a photojournalist who has visited most of the hot spots of the late Soviet Union. She also worked extensively on dangerous humanitarian missions in Africa.
The photographer formulates his position as follows: “I am always on the side of the weak.” Her attitude towards life and the subjects being filmed can be seen in her works. Empathy and active, rather than contemplative-passive sympathy, helps the photographer create wonderful photographs and, without waiting for requests for help, rush to where people are in poverty, suffering due to disasters and wars. Ivleva does a lot with her journalistic and photo reporting work - and has done throughout her career.
Work in African missions and other hot spots
The first conflict territory that revealed the character of the photojournalist was Nagorno-Karabakh, where Ivleva arrived at the call of her heart (and for work) on the day military units entered the city. She ended up there by chance, and, as she herself said, she was afraid that she would end up in the hands of the special services, that they would kill her, and no one would even know about her fate. However, the photographer was helped by the desire to talk about people on both sides of the conflict, to show them that they were not forgotten, they were not left alone in trouble. She communicated and communicates a lot with participants in the events, even more than 20 years after the conflict.
Ivleva was the only Russian journalist who worked in Rwanda during the genocide, which was accompanied, according to the photographer’s recollections, by “mounds of dead bodies” (as she said in an interview with Radio Liberty). She flew to a country gripped by apocalyptic horror on a military-humanitarian mission - to smuggle out women from the Russian Federation who had married Rwandans. After their rescue, she remained in the country and continued to help people. As the photographer herself says, she saved the lives of 200 people.
Having traveled through the territory of a dozen African countries, she not only photographed the civil wars and terror taking place there, but also helped the residents in action. Just look at the story of the sixteen-year-old boy from Uganda from her famous photo. He ended up in a rehabilitation camp for children rescued from the hands of Lord’s Resistance Army, a terrorist organization that turned teenagers into killers through intimidation and blackmail. Victoria photographed him with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his hands a few hours after his release, and he asked to pay for his school - the boy wanted to study, not kill.
The photographer promised to return and almost a year later went to look for the boy, not even knowing whether she could find a needle in a haystack that was engulfed in the fire of war. Ivleva found the boy and enrolled him in a school in a nearby town. Adon Bosk himself received the next grant for training, and now he is a graduate of RUDN University and a future doctor specializing in cardiac ultrasound.
This is just a small illustration from the life of Victoria Ivleva. How many more such stories were difficult for journalists to learn from her during interviews - she does not think that her person is interesting to anyone and prefers to speak out about socio-political problems rather than talk about herself.
And how many exciting things were left behind the scenes - about visits to colonies for women with small children, about trips to Nagorno-Karabakh, volunteering in Donbass, to which the journalist has recently devoted a lot of time. She even released a photo book about her Ukrainian travels and her work in the conflict zone. However, Victoria Ivleva was not always a journalist in hot spots and, in principle, began her creative career quite late.
From the Leningrad Institute of Culture to numerous personal photo exhibitions
The photographer was born in Leningrad in 1956, and her childhood was spent in the house where Alexander Blok once lived. She did not think about the profession of a photojournalist, was not interested in it and never attended photo clubs. Victoria entered the Leningrad Institute of Culture, where her friend, who was into photography, introduced the girl to his hobby. It impressed Victoria so much that she left the institute, entered first the photography school, and then the Moscow State University, the Faculty of Journalism, which she graduated in 1983.
Having become a professional photographer, Ivleva photographed children and adults on the streets, workers in bakeries and factories, girls reading in the subway and city landscapes. During the collapse of the USSR, she “retrained” as practically a military photojournalist, but after a trip to Rwanda she became very disillusioned with the profession. It seemed to her that it was vile: to observe and film someone else’s grief without helping people.
For almost ten years, Victoria Ivleva “fell out of the profession” - she took care of the house, raised two sons, and even tried to join the International Red Cross, but did not complete the job. She returned to working as a photojournalist and traveling to dangerous places. Victoria Ivleva collaborates with charitable organizations, caring people who help those who are left paralyzed after accidents, find themselves in a difficult situation and need media attention and support.
At the same time, the photographer remains a top-class professional, famous for her keen eye and original presentation of material shot on the Nikon F4 and Nikon D3, which she uses in her work. Her personal exhibitions were held in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and many other cities in Russia and abroad. She published the photo album Temps Present de la Russie in France, collaborates with Sobesednik, the Snob.ru portal and other respected publications.
Victoria Ivleva is not afraid to directly express her civic position and remains who she has always been - a talented photographer and a brave, bright, beautiful woman.
At the beginning of this year, photographer and journalist Victoria Ivleva released the Russian edition of a book-album about her journey through post-revolutionary Ukraine (the Ukrainian edition appeared a year earlier in Kyiv), and already in March she began work on a new project, and it is also dedicated to Ukraine. What she wants to tell her compatriots about this country, is it possible to reach people fooled by propaganda, and is there a difference between a journalist and a person - Ivleva spoke about all this in an interview with Bird In Flight.
Victoria Ivleva’s work for the last two years has been closely connected with Ukraine. At the height of the war in the East, she, together with Kharkov volunteers, organized the evacuation of Donbass residents from the combat zone. In the spring of 2014, I traveled through Ukrainian cities and recently, having raised funds through a crowdfunding campaign, I published the book “Mandrivka, or the Journey of a Facebook Worm across Ukraine.”
Last week Victoria Ivleva visited Kiev, met with Bird In Flight and talked about her new project.
Victoria Ivleva
Russian photographer and correspondent. Born in Leningrad, lives in Moscow. Graduate of the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. She has worked in many hot spots of the world, collaborates with Russian and foreign publications, winner of the Golden Eye Award from World Press Photo for filming inside the destroyed reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, as well as the German Gerd Bucerius Prize, laureate of the Union of Journalists of Russia, twice nominated for the Prize named after. Andrey Sakharov...
What are you working on this time?
For the last two years, while in Ukraine, I have been trying for a very long time to find some kind of photographic symbol of the entire state in which the country is in. All this ideological reversal, this unification of people for the sake of love for their country, in fact, the emergence of a new nation. In general, I thought for a very long time until I finally realized that this was childbirth. The birth was difficult, with blood, with a cesarean section; perhaps with pain, with fear, but ending, like most births, with a wonderful result - the birth of a child. Even if at first he is small, red, with wrinkled hands, but there is hope that one of these children will someday grow up to be Taras or Alexander Sergeevich or someone else good.
This is how the “Birth of Ukraine” project, a future photo exhibition, appeared. As part of it, I travel to all regional centers and take portraits of women in labor and newly born children.
In hospitals?
In maternity hospitals and perinatal centers. The road to this, of course, was not easy. I conceived the project last summer, and the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine, of which I am a member, immediately volunteered to help me. They wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, then the same letter was written by your people’s deputy Yaroslav Markevich, whom I don’t know, but we have mutual friends in Belarus. As a result, the Ministry of Health said: come, there will be a congress of obstetricians and gynecologists in Kyiv, you can speak there. Of course, I spoke - during those five minutes people from the audience looked at me like I was the town crazy. But, nevertheless, several people came up afterwards, left their cards, and said: if you come, we will help in our cities. This was still not enough; you can’t do such a project with just acquaintances. State support was needed, because filming had to be done in government institutions.
And then I received a letter from Tatyana Kolomiychenko, secretary of the Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Ukraine. She writes to me: “Hello, we met at the congress. Forgive me if I spoke to you coldly then, but I read your Facebook and am ready to help in everything.” Now Tatyana is doing some incredible things for me: she calls all the cities where I’m going in advance and negotiates everything. The result is wonderful.
I have already visited nine cities: east, south and center. To show the continuity of this entire process, we have to shoot in the “one day - one city” mode. In short, I spend the night either on the train or in the maternity hospital. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea remains in doubt for me...
In the case of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, will these photographs become a symbol of the birth of a new Crimea, given that the majority of Crimeans do not particularly want to associate themselves with the new Ukraine?
Well, we can’t make a project about the birth of a new Ukraine without Crimea. We will have to figure out how to get out of this situation. Perhaps it will be just a piece of paper: blue and yellow. Although, of course, photographing childbirth is very pleasant. It’s such happiness when you see a head coming out, and behind it everything else, a scream, a heel, a mother who is simply dying of happiness, a father. And for the first time I saw the work of doctors from the inside, I saw how responsible these people are, how interested they are in what they do. This is an environment in which it is pleasant to work: I do my job, people do theirs.
How do you select heroes?
No, everything is tied to time: whoever agreed, agreed. The other day, one girl said: “Take me off, but don’t bother the child, you can jinx me.” I say: “Darling, you live in a cave, do you have a computer, the Internet? Do you seriously think that a child can be jinxed?” In general, we broke up.
You have been working in Ukraine for quite a long time. Why, in your opinion, is the birth taking place right now, and not in 1991, not with the beginning of perestroika, or after Chernobyl?
You see, perestroika caused a rise in civic consciousness throughout the USSR; I can’t say that in Kyiv it was somehow higher. At that time, few people thought about an independent Ukraine. Chernobyl was a very big incentive, but first of all for the top, for Gorbachev, it showed that nothing can be hidden...
It so happened that only now, having gone through this conflict, through blood, Ukraine is acquiring a new quality. After all, you are very lucky: for almost 25 years of independence, Ukraine has not known the smell of blood, has not experienced a single internal conflict, unlike other Soviet republics.
Many within the country were short of blood...
Well, now they've got it. Perhaps in quantitative terms it is small compared to other conflicts...
Yes, but only through blood did a certain cleansing take place, cutting off the past from oneself, leaving this communist pea jacket. And in 25 years, you have raised a new generation of people who do not know how to be afraid. And those who knew how, those who were older, forgot. After all, you had a very quiet country.
Don’t you think that this whole process of decommunization, de-Russification, launched from above with such pressure, will teach people to be afraid again?
I would generalize these processes as de-Sovietization. There is no de-Russification as such, it’s just that Russia is moving by leaps and bounds towards the Soviet Union, although it is clear that you cannot step into the same river twice.
Look, in all the Ukrainian maternity hospitals where I have been working in recent weeks, they knew that I was from Russia, but not a single person said a single bad word about this. In a maternity hospital in Dnepropetrovsk, a female doctor approached me and asked: “Are you from Russia? Do you know that it was you who started the war, you attacked us?” I was a little stunned by such an onslaught and advised her to change her tone. A little later, another maternity hospital employee came up to me and said: “Excuse her, she is a refugee from Gorlovka, her house was destroyed, we are trying to support her here as best we can.” And then I was overwhelmed with such shame that when she returned, I rushed to her to ask for forgiveness. In short, she and I burst into tears together.
In all the Ukrainian maternity hospitals where I have been working in recent weeks, they knew that I was from Russia, but not a single person said a single bad word about this.
In general, I don’t see a rejection of everything Russian here, I don’t see that people have stopped reading Tolstoy or won’t go to see a Russian film because it’s Russian. There are a certain number of marginalized people, but this is normal when there are many different opinions in society. The main thing is that fascist views do not dominate, and they do not dominate here, just like anti-Russian ones.
I agree, it’s just that for some of our colleagues these attacks on freedom under the sign of the fight against the Soviet or Russian are very sensitive.
Do you mean the Kotsaba case?
As one example. This is exactly the case when a person falls under some vague image of an internal enemy and simply no one wants to deal with this matter.
He is bad, the case with Kotsaba, of course, but at least they talk about it. In Russia they wouldn't say it. In addition, you don’t have the kind of bubbling hatred on social networks that you have in Russia in relation to, say, Savchenko. But you came out of the same Soviet overcoat, and its weight also pulls you down. No one promises instant paradise, you just have chosen the right vector. And even though this is Ulita Cherepakhovna, she is moving in the right direction, crawling away from Soviet power, from Soviet thinking.
Tell us about Russia. How did the publication of “Mandrivka” go? How successful was the crowdfunding experiment?
Surprisingly quite successful. The father of this fundraising was Viktor Shenderovich, he said: “If I say to go and collect money, then everything will work out.” And so it happened, as a result, money came not only from Russia, but also from Ukraine and other countries.
Was the book in demand in Russia? Do people in your country want to read materials written by an independent journalist outside the framework of the existing propaganda struggle?
We printed only a thousand copies - not the largest circulation, especially for a country of 140 million. But the very fact that a book is now being published in Russia, written without all this political confrontation, written by a man who traveled through Ukraine and wrote about what he sees, looking from right to left, this fact really warms me. This is not even a political, but a moral gesture.
I sell the book through Facebook or at some meetings; it is not available in large stores. And now half of the circulation has been sold, although not even three months have passed. Another question is who buys it. And it is bought by people who already look in the same direction as me. And this is always a problem - how to reach the opposite side. To those who, despite other views, are able not to curse, but to talk.
Yes, this part of Russian society is least represented in the public sphere. We know about those who sympathize with Ukraine, about the opposition, we see some kind of wound up, fooled crowd, but there are also others...
Perhaps they are so naive that they believe the propaganda. Because when you try to talk to them, ask a simple question: “Have you become happier because of this war?” - you can’t find anyone who would. And I even think that the one who started this war did not become any happier. This is where the understanding comes that, perhaps, it was not necessary to start a war, but to take care of one’s own country.
But how to reach these people? I don’t understand how to make sure that the book reaches them. This is simply impossible in conditions of total lack of freedom. I can’t take my books and go to the soldiers’ barracks and tell them something. I can’t come to the hospital and say: “Citizens, doctors, let me read you a book.”
You came out of the same Soviet overcoat, and its weight also pulls you down.
In such conditions, as a journalist, what topics do you see for yourself in Russia?
Don't know. For many years I photographed a women's colony, a zone. Now it’s impossible to get there; the last time I was there was in 2012. The prison system is a good reflection of what is happening in the country. As soon as the regime becomes tougher outside, it becomes tougher inside too. If only a narrow path remained allowed for journalists outside, then inside there was none left at all. And not because there is an order from above, it’s just that locals are afraid in advance, just in case.
This “fear in advance” - in your opinion, can we overcome it?
Certainly. It comes from the Soviet Union, where we all lived in fear. But just two years after the start of perestroika, the country was unrecognizable. When you walk on all fours your whole life, and then someone tells you to stand up to your full height, it’s really uncomfortable at first. But then it turns out that this is natural. So being free is natural for a person.
Working in the East with Kharkov volunteers, did you see this overcoming?
No, it was completely different. We were evacuating people, and when you save a person’s life, you don’t think about politics at all, there are more important things.
Is it difficult to evacuate people and do journalism at the same time?
Not really. It even gives some kind of head start. Because a volunteer in Ukraine is always a person with a plus sign. You come with something good, you can help with something, and the person begins to open up, tell you some stories that he would not tell to journalists. Especially those who come rushing in and immediately demand something for themselves. In general, it didn’t bother me. Another thing is that there are costs: when you volunteer, you cannot quit your job for a good shot or an interview, because human lives are behind you. And yet, during this time I made six large stories for the Dozhd TV channel about the life of ordinary people in a military zone.
More than once I have had the opportunity to be a participant in discussions about whether a journalist has the right to interfere in the course of events, to somehow help what is happening.
I never understood this. How can journalism be more valuable than life? These are incomparable quantities. Of course, there is journalism that saves lives, but it is very rare. After all, you can combine. You can give someone a helping hand, a cup of tea or a blanket and talk about what you see and feel. And then you learn some story and tell it through this cup of tea. And people who watch or read this story understand how wonderful it is to help others. This is journalism.
Last September, when we met with you on the Hungarian-Serbian border, which was closed to keep refugees out, you said one phrase that stuck in my head: “A huge injustice is happening before our eyes, and we are doing nothing about it.” we can do it."
What can a journalist do in such a situation, other than tell people about the injustice that is happening?
Why do we always separate the journalist from the person? What should a teacher do in such a situation? Watch someone being killed or humiliated before your eyes, and then come and tell your students that this is unfair? No, I think we need to intervene. Then, at the border, when you and I were installing barbed wire, we did absolutely the right thing, because we made life easier for several people. But it’s easy for me to say, because I’m still a free journalist, I don’t depend on the editors.
I understand that there is news: this and that happened here, but it’s only three seconds. And the number of people doing this is often more than necessary, because with modern technologies, one person is enough for the world to know about it in three minutes. I remember in 1994 there was a huge number of journalists in Rwanda, especially from the USA - it seems that every state sent a group there. There were few volunteers and humanitarian missions, but there were many journalists, and many behaved in a very boorish way. Yes, you eat your Snickers somewhere around the corner, and not in front of a dozen hungry people! After Rwanda, I somehow became very disillusioned with journalism, I even had a break from work for almost 10 years, until the money ran out and it turned out that I still couldn’t do anything else, just write and film.
How did you come to this - independence from editors?
Yes, I’ve worked like this almost all my life, since the times of the USSR. I had such a case, also connected with Ukraine: in 1984 I went to the Kirovograd region, to the village of Pavlysh, to a school created by the outstanding Ukrainian teacher Vasily Sukhomlinsky. I made a double-page spread for the “Interlocutor” supplement to Komsomolskaya Pravda about this school. The next day I open the newspaper, and it says: “As Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko said at some party congress...” I think: “Holy shit, what is Chernenko doing here?” I called the newspaper, and they told me: the editor set it up.
This had a very strong effect on me, and I didn’t write anything for a long time, because I understood that with such an approach it would be embarrassing for me, not the editor. I only did photography, and only when I went to Novaya Gazeta in the early 2000s did I start writing there. But at Novaya no one edited my texts or cut off a single millimeter of the photograph without asking. I am not invited to join the staff, and that suits me. It seems to me that this is how honest journalism should be. After all, great journalism, journalism on the level of Hemingway, has practically disappeared. And not because there are no more talented journalists - it’s just that no one has time for great journalism.
