I will show you three different projects that I did.
First one is about my travels through the ex-Soviet Union.
The second one is about my travels through China.
And the third one is give me your image.
I just pushed the arrow here.
I want to use this.
I feel free.
So I will start with the book that is called 100 Summers, 100 Winters.
And that's about my travels through the ex-Soviet Union in the beginning,
before the changes and after the changes from communism to the Republic of Russia.
And I traveled all through the whole ex-Soviet Union to all the provinces as they were called.
And I stayed with families because at that time we didn't know anything about Russians.
We didn't know who they were, where they lived, who they lived, how they lived,
and what they looked like, how their daily life was.
And I thought it would be very interesting to go and try to find out.
I started working with a very simple amateur camera, of course, with film,
because it was in the beginning of the 90s.
And the reasons were that, first of all, I didn't look as a photographer so much,
so I was not threatening because I wanted to stay with the people in their houses.
And I was just a sort of visitor or friend who happened to take pictures.
The second reason was that it was quite handy because I had to travel a lot,
and I like to travel light, so I only had these three small cameras
and not a lot of equipment and things that would hinder me.
And the third reason was that it was quite dangerous to travel with expensive cameras,
of course, in Russia because they would be stolen.
And so they looked at my cameras like they called Igrushkas, like what do you call it, toys.
So, well, I will start showing you a lot of pictures.
This is in Georgia, and it is an aristocratic family who, just after the changes,
got back their house.
There had been living six families in the house, and now they got their own house back,
and they could use all the bourgeois furniture that they had before,
that they had been hiding.
This is in Odessa, in Moldova, and there was a sort of war between Moldova and Transnistria.
And in the hotels where the soldiers lived, a lot of girls were there,
at the, well, how do you call it, for the children, as prostitutes.
This is in Tbilisi also in Georgia, and of course there was very often no electricity,
and so we were having our, the most closest we had with us, we had them all,
and the guy who was living in this house where we stayed, he was always in his morning dress.
He had newspapers in front of the windows just to protect from the cold.
This is a place in Siberia.
This is a funeral also in Siberia, and I was very lucky because I took this picture
from the window of my friends where I was staying from above,
and two weeks, no, one week before there was still snow,
but it would have been a very cliche photograph if I had taken it in the snow,
but now I like very much the graphic, like a cross and so on.
And you can see the coffin is open in Russia, and in the front there are people with music.
This is in a prison also in Siberia, a girl in a restaurant,
and I'm very much touched by the small thing that probably her grandmother or her mother made,
and a lot, of course, Russians at that time, they always had self-made clothes
because there were no department stores where you could get hot couture or whatever.
A self-made bedroom at the attic of the son of the people that I was staying with,
and it's all cardboard, and I started working in black and white,
but then seeing all the beautiful colors in Russia, we had these synthetic colors,
but these colors are still, I think, like colors are meant to be,
so I really was so much liking these colors that I decided to start taking pictures in color.
This is the daughter of my friend Lialia Kuznetsova on her bed,
and a self-made mosquito net, two friends in Donetsk on the dome,
and the girl is very proud that her husband irons his own shirt.
And you can see, as you can see, the beautiful wallpaper and the beautiful bedspread.
Of course, the life outside was very threatening and dangerous,
so women, of course, always tried to make it comfortable in the house,
and they used everything they could find, but of course, there was not much,
but wallpaper was mostly there.
Well, two friends.
This is a funny situation.
The man is my Russian teacher.
I speak Russian because, of course, by staying with the Russians,
it was necessary because nobody talked any other language,
and he at a certain moment asked me,
could I make some pictures of a friend of his who wanted to become a model?
She was 14 years old, and of course, I agreed,
so I took a lot of photos of her in his house,
and she had these fantastic poses that I thought,
well, I would like to make also some pictures for myself.
So I asked my teacher to sit there and for them to pose together,
and we had a lot of fun, of course,
but the sad thing of the story is that she became a model
and she emigrated to Western Europe, to Germany,
and we have never heard of her anymore.
Yeah, this is also in Donetsk on the Don,
and this is the same couple that was sitting on,
the man was ironing,
and the man is the grandfather who was an aristocrat,
but he was also a communist,
and he was a party member,
but he was very reluctant to have me in the house
because he thought I was a spy,
and it took me days to get his confidence,
and at a certain moment he trusted me,
and he showed me his party member papers,
and this is what he's doing at the moment.
But what I like about this picture is,
well, this is the advantage of working with small cameras,
and of course the display is not so well,
so you can't always see what's happening,
and what I like a lot is this very spontaneous way of photographing,
having surprises also,
sometimes when I see the picture afterwards,
I see a hand or I see a movement,
and it's not disturbing me.
On the contrary, I really like it
because it adds something to the spontaneity of the picture.
This is the...
Well, of course the aristocracy had to hide himself during communism,
and this was the first ball in Moscow for the aristocracy.
The woman, the older woman, she was a princess,
and all her life she has been working as a laborer,
because of course it would have been very dangerous for her
to reveal her background,
and the girl behind her is her granddaughter.
In this house, as you can see, there was no wallpaper
because it was not available,
and this guy, he was so happy and proud of his equipment.
For me it was quite old, but for him it was fantastic and new.
And you can see the communistic star in the corner.
Well, three young people in a restaurant in Nizhny Novgorod.
This is 10 o'clock in the morning in Siberia,
and already the vodka is flowing heavily,
and as you can see, the wife is not so happy with the situation.
The man is a shepherd, and we met him in the fields,
and then he invited us at home.
This is in the middle of a very small village in Siberia.
And this is in St. Petersburg.
A woman who collected birds in a room,
and of course this was very asocial
because there were no rooms available in the city,
so she didn't want the neighbors to know
that this whole room was full with birds.
This is one of my favorite pictures.
It's in Tomsk in the railway station,
and what you see behind is not a painting, but it's really snow.
Well, this has so much about life at that time
in communism and post-communism time in the Soviet Union.
Well, if you go now to Moscow or to St. Petersburg,
or the big cities, of course a lot has changed,
but if you go in the countryside, it's still the same.
Nothing has changed.
People are very poor.
This guy, this is in Armenia,
and there was a war with Azerbaijan.
The pictures that you see on the wall
are from his father and his older brother,
who have died in the war with Azerbaijan.
His mother is very proud that he's now a soldier,
and he's 19 years old, and he's going into this war also.
As you can see, she's showing me his pistol,
and well, he's very, very proud himself as well,
to be a soldier and to go into this war,
and his fatherland.
I don't know how to say this in English.
This is in Odessa, in a Gypsy camp,
and this is also one of my favorites.
It's because I like also the funny effect of photography,
that it seems like the boy is floating or something,
and well, it's just not reality,
not like it is really.
In barracks, also in Kishinau, in Moldova,
and the bread that you see is a very famous Baradinsky bread,
that is the best bread in the world.
And as you can see, in the left corner,
there is a hand that I hadn't seen,
when I took the picture of course,
but this is one of the things that I like a lot.
The soft horse, the red flag in Kazakhstan.
These little pans are being brought out to the countryside
where the people are working.
This is a police in a bathhouse,
and this is the cover of the book.
A friend of mine in Odessa.
And the people that I was staying with in Moscow,
this is Viktor,
in Moscow I had my basis and I went all over the country from there.
I took a flight ticket for $7 to go to Novikosnetsk or so.
In Tomsk, near the university.
Self-made dress, of course.
This is the direct direction of the prison in Tomsk,
in the corner you see Lenin.
A brick factory, where this is the recreation room.
I really love this picture,
because also of the strange reflection of the table on the wall
and the colour and the emptiness.
There is a collective kitchen in Siberia
where people still are living,
with a lot of families in one floor.
They have a collective kitchen,
and every woman has her own table,
and it looks like a chaos,
but if you look well, it's very nicely organised.
Even the plastic bags are hanging in a row.
Once in an exhibition in the Stadelik,
I heard some people commenting on the floor
that was not so nicely repaired,
and they said, well, these lazy Russians,
they don't even care about repairing the floor,
and I was so angry when I heard that,
because of course there is nothing to repair the floor with.
So now we are going to China.
This is my book called East Wind, West Wind.
It came out in 2004.
No, 2002, sorry.
This is a 24-hour cinema in Shanghai,
where people are...
No, it's not in Shanghai.
It's in the west of China, in a city called Chongqing.
People are such... You see a hat there,
and they're just sitting in these boxes
to look at the film, or not to look at the film,
to do something else, I don't know.
But I was really...
This is one of the things that I like about photography,
that you have these surprises and this luck.
Sometimes a picture of things is very clever,
of course now, in digital times,
you could paste this image in the screen of the cinema,
but this was really what I found.
So this is, for me, a sort of gift.
I was in a very remote place, staying with the family,
and we were going to a neighborhood village
in a small car with three wheels,
and it was a bumpy, of course, the roads in China,
in the countryside, are really not so comfortable.
So this is a father and his daughter,
and she's holding his leg.
And for me, well, when I made the picture,
I thought of that, but when I saw it back,
it was for me something that really said something
about my feeling in life at that moment.
I felt very lonely and wanted someone to hold,
and sometimes it happens like that.
Well, this is in an airport.
You see how Russians like to decorate,
even in the restaurants of the airports
with beautiful curtains and so on.
This is in Russia, it was China, I'm sorry.
This is in the atelier of a friend, a painter,
and drying laundry on the beach.
Chinese girls always want to protect their faces
against the sun because they don't want to get sunburned.
And I like the colors and the sort of movement of the blue.
This is in Shanghai.
You have beautiful girls in Shanghai.
These are three Buddhist monks,
and they are 12, 13, and 14.
They are not voluntary monks,
but their parents are poor and then sell them
to a Tibetan or Hindu Buddhist monastery.
And this picture also has a story.
This is Chinese New Year, and I was with this family,
and it is very rare that as a foreigner or an outsider,
you are invited to the party of the New Year
because it's very much a family thing.
So I was invited to this party,
and I took this picture, and this is an uncle
and his cousin, or what is it called in English?
Not cousin, but not nephew, but the niece.
Right, thank you.
An uncle and his niece, and she's kissing his hand.
And then later, a magazine, a very famous magazine,
I won't say the name,
asked me if they could use some pictures from China,
and it was by a French agency.
And of course, I gave six or seven pictures,
and then when I saw the magazine by accident,
it was a story about abuse of older men, of small children.
So you can imagine how angry I was,
and I hope they will never see this, but I don't think so,
but I mean, I felt, of course, I feel responsible for the people
that I take pictures of, and then such a thing happens,
which you can't know, of course, and well, anyway.
This was on the trip in China,
where we took a trip in a bus for hours and hours.
A wedding part, after a wedding party,
you can see all these things, the sunflower shells from a bus.
No, from a taxi, sorry.
This is in Hong Kong.
The only picture there is from Hong Kong in the book.
Well, inside an apartment, as you can see.
Not so safe, I think.
This is a back of an apartment building.
In a bar in Shanghai,
and I like the repetition of movements and hands,
and so in the painting of Mac and of the people.
This is the only picture, because most of the time
I take pictures of people agreeing, but not always,
because sometimes you break the spontaneity,
and this was in a bar,
and these people really didn't want their picture to be taken,
so this is why they react like that.
But, I mean, I know that these people
are not the most sympathetic sort of people in the world.
This was a very mafia sort of disco,
so I didn't have any regrets.
I took this picture out from the street into a barbershop.
No, it's not a barbershop.
It's a shop where, well, in China you have a nice habit,
when a couple marries before, about two months before,
they have a whole session of taking pictures,
and they go to a shop where they get a dress and they get made up,
and then it's all fake, and they are making these beautiful pictures
for the album, and then the real marriage is probably not that beautiful looking,
so it's just for the album to keep the photos.
This is also in the disco.
Oh, I have to hurry, so I will start telling less in the disco
in a girl in a university where they sleep together with five other girls,
and this is the only privacy they have.
These girls are called Salt Silver and Gold, and Hutong's in Beijing, also in Beijing.
So now we get to give me your image.
Do I have to rush?
How much time do I have?
You were supposed to go too much five minutes ago.
I'm sorry.
So I won't say anything then, just look at the pictures.
I took pictures of pictures all over Europe,
and the arrow goes to the two ounce of the person that gave me the picture.
This was not after the war, like this wrote in New York Times,
but it is at the beginning of the war.
The girls still have their dresses on, but they are already being shaved and bowled in Auschwitz.
Oh, what's happening?
Yes.
Oops.
Oh, okay, thanks.
This is how I found the picture about the First World War in Belgrade.
This is Moldova, a socialist album in Toulouse, France, the typical bourgeois environment in Sofia, in Rome.
This is in Paris, a migrant family.
This is Albania, Germany, Munich, Paris, also a migrant family.
This is the woman who killed her husband in Greece.
I'm very proud of this picture because this is in a very right-wing fascist family in Madrid,
and this is a demonstration of pro-Franco, not against Franco.
Sweden, Stockholm, and I think this is Stockholm or Amsterdam are the only places in the world where I could have taken this picture,
and the woman herself, I suggested I should use these pictures, so I thought that was great.
Also here in Stockholm, this is in Belgrade, and this is in Albania, in England minus Yorkshire.
I had been there 15 years before and I came back to this village and everybody knew me still.
It was very nice, yes. In Paris again.
I like the sort of strange atmosphere of these pictures because you don't know where you are,
and it's a little bit unreal. Prague, and I think this is the last one.
This is Stockholm also.
It's Milano to lose. Moldova Kishinau to lose, and to lose the album of her father in Paris.
Okay, that was it.
