Ukraine List

I saw this photo recently come over Flickr, and I thought it was a really great shot of Kamianets Podiliskyi. You can see the top of the fortress in the back and the Turkish bridge leading up to the fortification. The framing and perspective are beautiful, and it was taken by Alexander Kidalov. You can […]

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I have used a couple of photos from this photographer previously, so I thought I would post a few more photos that I liked from his sight, Blot of Light. You can access the photo blog directly from the link or use this site’s blogroll.

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“If it is necessary to choose between truth and beauty, I’ll choose beauty.” — Olexandr Dovzhenko
I’ve recently been intrigued by the Ukrainian filmmaker, Olexandr Dovzhenko. He was active from the 1920s into the 1940s and is often grouped in the trio of great Soviet filmmakers along with Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The most known of Dovzhenko’s […]

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I’ve had a draft post about Gogol Bordello languishing since the beginning of January, so I thought I would finally polish it off. And since Eugene Hutz is one of the co-stars in the movie Everything is Illuminated, I thought I’d just combine the two topics.
Anyhow, I went to see Gogol Bordello in mid-December at […]

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I noticed on eBay that a few historic photos from the Steinbeck novel, A Russian Journal, were up for auction.

In 1947 John Steinbeck traveled to the Soviet Union with the celebrated war photographer, Robert Capa, who just a few short years before had been photographing Omaha beach during D-Day. They subsequently released A Russian Journal […]

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I ran into a few images this week that I found interesting. The first one is a Soviet propaganda poster from 1930. It says, “Let’s annihilate the kulak’s class.” The image came from plakaty.ru which has a very nice collection of Russian propaganda posters.

By the way, this article written by Lynne Viola is an interesting […]

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Both English Russia and Carpetblogger recently highlighted the color photos of the Russian Empire from the early 1900s taken by the photographer, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. He used a technique of taking photo plates utilizing red, green, and blue filters, and by recombining these plates, a color image can be wonderfully reproduced. In his day, he used […]

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I thought this was an excellent photo of an accordion player playing in the Kyiv metro. It was taken by Neil Navneet and is on TrekEarth.

Of course this accordion has keys, but many musicians in Ukraine play what’s called the bayan — or button accordion. This site, says that the accordion originally came from Germany […]

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