I know, I know, a thousand words. They say that's the market value of a photo. But what if I don't want words?
Fug me. I'm not in a happy mood and here is the reason: while I was photographing these children, playing in front of their apartment building, my camera bag was stolen off the playground. I berate myself. I was too absorbed in what I was doing. Although my bag was on a bench only 5 meters away, that was 4 and 1/2 meters too far.
What's in your bag? It's a game photographers like to play with each other. I'll tell you: there's more in there than I realized. I made a list for the insurance company of 41 things that were in my bag, ranging from pricy lenses to the inexpensive but hard-to-replace notes from an interview this afternoon. (I'll post the list here later).
A group of ten-year-old children play on the small playground outside their apartment building on Mayakovskogo Prospekt. Most of the evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident were relocated here to the Desnyanskiy district at the outskirts of Kyiv. More than twenty years later, nearly half of the 46,000 former residents of the city of Pripyat still live in Desnyanskiy raion, where they struggle with health problems, unemployment, little government support and overflowing apartments, in which three generations of extended families often live crowded into a two room apartment.
While the sun was setting and I was laying in the dirt taking this photo, my camera was being stolen behind me.
