More inauguration party photos

Each morning when I awake, I still find it hard to believe that Barack Obama is really our President. I started reading his autobiography, Dreams from My Father; I find it inspiring that we now have a leader who is a good writer, felt an early calling to do public service, and lived abroad as a child.





     By popular request, here are two dozen photos from the Kyiv Inaugural Ball. Feel free to download these photos for personal use. For other purposes, contact me.

To get high-resolution copies of these photos, email the event organizers, Democrats Abroad in Ukraine. Eventually, they will also put photos on their website.

Click on each thumbnail to see a larger version. Enjoy!

Chernobyl Control Room 1

An inactive information panel in Control Room 1 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant showed the status of all the fuel rods in the reactor pool.

The Chernobyl plant has been inactive since 2000, but it took Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) until last week to approve decommissioning. Depending on your perspective, this is either big news — because it allows for the nuclear fuel rods to be finally moved to safe storage — or unimportant, because it is just another small bureaucratic step in a 75 year clean-up process.

The day after the law passed, I had my first opportunity to visit the inside of the Chernobyl plant. Once I have time to edit and organize photos, I will post a description of a day in the life inside Chernobyl.

Yes We Did!

Ukraine celebrated the inauguration of Barack Obama with a giant formal ball in Kiev.

Ukrainian pop star Gaitana, I must say, was amazing.

Like Obama, Gaitana rocked the house. (Like Obama, she is half-African, her mother Ukrainian and her father Congolese.)

The ball was attended by hundreds of Americans and Ukrainians, plus dignitaries and diplomats from around the world. Here, some ambassador and some famous Ukrainian writer and the chair of Democrats Abroad in Ukraine all dance their hearts out.

I am not much of a celebrity-monger, but wasn't that just the Speaker of the House? Accompanied by that famous philanthropist? And there goes the Director of the National Security Council!

Obama takes an oath. Svetlana pours drinks.

Oh yeah, now and then we paused in our festivities to watch the actual historic event unfold in Washington.

As an American far from home, I simply felt proud.

[Note to my regular readers: yes, it was a bit of a shock to jump from the village where I've been photographing straight to the Hyatt Regency Kiev. Fear not, I'll be back in the village tomorrow.]

[Note to my new readers: I am processing requests for photos from the Ball as fast as I can. I'll add more photos to the blog next week and I'll send out copies of photos to those I've promised, but it may take me a week.]

Father Nazarii in the snow

Father Momotyuk Nazarii, the village priest at the church in Novo Ladizhichi, Ukraine, walks through the swirling snow as he goes Christmas caroling with members of his congregation.

The group spent two days celebrating Ukrainian Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 2009, by going door to door all over Sukachi and Novo Ladizhichi, singing, offering blessings, and collecting donations for the church. When people gave them candy and fruit, they redistributed it to children and elderly residents.

Novo Ladizhichi was built in 1987 to house evacuees from the original village of Ladizhichi following the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

This photo was inspired by my favorite photo of Thomas Hoepker's. (His is better). This photo of an old German woman in a snowstorm opens his recent exhibit in Bratislava, Slovakia.

New Years Eve

Natasha and her friends spend New Years Eve driving around Kyiv in a very long limousine. Shortly before midnight they headed downtown to Maidan Nezhelezhnosti (Freedom Square) to enjoy the crowds and fireworks.

I returned to Ukraine a few hours before 2008 ended. Too late to get home and too tired to go out, I spent a quiet evening in Kyiv with my friend Sergii, brainstorming designs for my next photo exhibit. Near midnight, we went for a walk around the block and met Sergii's neighbor Natasha, getting ready to party with her friends in a very very long stretch limo.

С Новым Годом! Happy New Year!

Exhibits + Events Archive 2008 - 2009

This is a list of Michael's past Chernobyl photography events.

• Dec. 2-13, 2009: ХОТИМ, ЧТОБЫ ПОМНИЛИ (Wanting Remembrance), Gallery Creativity, Moscow. See details.
• Sept 3-Oct 30, 2009: After Chernobyl exhibit, Madison Municipal Bldg. Artspace, Madison, WI. See details.
• June 5-July 3, 2009: Inside Chernobyl exhibit, Slavutych Museum, Ukraine.
• June 5, 2009 at 7 p.m. Inside Chernobyl exhibit opening.
• April 24-May 8, 2009: Inside Chernobyl exhibit, Shevchenko Park, Kyiv, Ukraine.
• April 24, 2009 at 3 p.m. Inside Chernobyl exhibit opening.
• Dec. 21, 2008. Chernobyl Today: talk and slideshow, 1420 Hill St., Ann Arbor, MI.
  
• Dec. 11, 2008. Chernobyl Liquidators: slideshow, Centre Dovira, Ivankiv, Ukraine.
  
• October 30, 2008. Benefit event. Oakwood West, Madison, WI. See details.
  
• July-August, 2008. After Chernobyl exhibit. UW Health Sciences Learning Center, Madison, WI. See details.
  
• June-July, 2008. After Chernobyl exhibit. Bethel Fireside Gallery, Madison, WI. Reception June 22. See details.
• June 27, 2008. Chernobyl Town Meeting. See details.

all night long

Sex sells.

A prostitute in the red light district of Amsterdam negotiates with a group of three young men over the price of her services.

Amsterdam is a bizarre place. I was flying from Kiev to Detroit when they shut down the airport because of fog. I was stuck in the Netherlands overnight. So I took my camera and wandered around the red light district most of the night.

I especially liked the glow-in-the-dark underwear. But is very odd the way "normal" stores, (a bar, a shwarma stand, a tourist souvenir shop) stand cheek-to-bowel with the women of the night behind their big windows.

Got yelled at by a drug dealer for taking photos of him, and challenged by a pimp for taking photos of his girls. After that, I put my camera inside my coat, lens barely sticking out between two buttons, and shot this way.

Glad my body is not for sale. (And really, who would buy, anyway?)

Orphanage in Vovchkiv

Nina Rudenko, director of the orphanage in Vovchkiv village, near Chernobyl, oversees the distribution of clothes from a Spanish charity.

Perspective

Students at the Perspective English school in Slavutich gossip while they look up words in a dictionary.

Today I like this picture but yesterday I hated it.

Ukrainian church, Novo Ladizhichi

An elderly woman prays during a service at the small Ukrainian church in Novo Ladizhichi village. "New Ladizhichi" was built in 1987 to house evacuees from the original village of Ladizhichi following the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The church has been under construction for a full decade, as villagers have had trouble raising enough money to continue building. Because the church is unfinished, it is decorated with temporary posters rather than paintings.

Sometimes the best photos are hiding in the corners. I was photographing this service when I got intrigued by the shadows. I have started a series of Chernobyl photos in which people appear only indirectly. This fits.

man, those girls could dance!

Teenage girls from villages near Chernobyl come to the community center in Borodyanka for dance lessons.

I've been too busy shooting and too far from the internet to post much lately, but in the coming weeks I'll start sharing some recent work from my months living in Sukachi village, near Chernobyl.

Full caption: Dance and music teacher Lesya Kostenko (left) leads a dance rehearsal at the Chernobyl Community Center in Borodyanka, Ukraine. Her students, including Ira Dovstenka (in white), and Olya Shvitka (in black) are all 14-year-old girls from the village Nove Zalissya, 7 kilometers away. Borodyanka is a small town (population 16,000) where many Chernobyl evacuees were resettled in 1986, 30 miles west of Kyiv and 30 miles south of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Sukachi liquor store

In a liquor and food store converted from an old trailer in Sukachi village, Ukraine, employees restock shelves in the evening, as seen through the trailer windows.

I've been on a shooting-through-windows kick recently. Partly I've been playing with layering, and partly it gets dark so damn early now (sunset about 3:45 pm) that much of my street photography has been in the night.

Or maybe it says something deep about my feelings of being an outsider, peering in from the outside.

Centre Dovira

If you read Ukrainian, you can read a nice little blurb about my After Chernobyl project on the homepage of the Centre Dovira in Ivankiv, Ukraine: http://ivankiv.cspr.info/

If you, like me, don't read Ukrainian, here it is in translation.

Hope

Hope, 2008.

I am feeling a lot of hope for the future this past week. Since I'm currently free from the constraints of shooting news stories, I've been pushing myself to make some more metaphorical images. Photos that capture an idea rather than a literal truth. So I went looking for some photos to express my newfound optimism.

I seldom bother to shoot from a moving vehicle. The rate of success is too low to make it feel worthwhile. On this morning, however, the fog was so dense and mysterious that I was coaxed into pulling out my camera. When we stopped beside a dirt road in the middle of nowhere I was ready.

What, you want a real caption? Okay, fine: A passenger disembarks from a bus on the road from Kyiv to Slavutich, Ukraine, as seen out the bus window on a foggy fall morning.

Slavutich

Slavutich is the new city built in Ukraine after the Chernobyl accident to house evacuees from the abandoned Exclusion Zone. Today nearly 4,000 of the 25,000 inhabitants still work at Chernobyl, commuting on 3 special electric trains that depart early each morning and get home after dark. In the evening, the workers walk home from the train station past the main supermarket in town.