#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Severny Gorod media company and the This Is Taimyr online publication photojournalist became the winner of the Streetphotorussia-2021 international photo contest of street photography. Any photographer in the world can participate in it, but the photos have to be taken in Russia.
The winning photo was Nikolay Shchipko’s shot from Dolgoye lake in Norilsk, an inexhaustible source of inspiration and prize-winning work for many photographers.
The Streetphotorussia community was founded in the summer of 2018 to develop and popularize street photography in Russia. The project was created by street photographers Dmitry Egorov from Buguruslan and his colleague Nikita Egorov from St. Petersburg. The competition jury included ten photographers from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, New York, including the creators of the competition.
Street photography is a genre of art accessible to everyone without exception, which implies precisely a laid-back photograph of everything that surrounds us. In essence, this is reportage photography, not subject to any specific editorial task, but having a specific theme.
It is customary to correlate street photography with the activities of the French ideologist of this genre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who first formulated its basic principles, the main of which are the truthfulness of the plot and the invisibility of the photographer.
It would seem there is nothing complicated in it, but technical and artistic means, coupled with the author’s view of what is happening, are able to make simple, and sometimes primitive plots into deep art works.
There is currently a second surge in street photography after the second half of the last century. This is due to the new capabilities of digital cameras, which allow you to more fully implement the principle of invisibility of the filmmaker and, as a result, the truthfulness of the plot. You can simply twist the camera with a rotary screen in your hands, without bringing it up to your eyes, and take the necessary shots.
Truthfulness and invisibility are, in fact, one of the fundamental principles of photojournalism. It is not surprising that Nikolay Shchipko has been working as a photojournalist for several decades, first at the Zapolyarny Vestnik newspaper, then at the Severny Gorod media company This Is Taimyr and the Taimyr Telegraph online publications.
However, being a longtime street photographer, he still often shoots on black and white film with a film camera. Like a great admirer of the Cartier-Bresson galaxy, he uses the classic German brand Leica. Remember the WWII chroniclers of the Bresson generation? – “with a Leica and a notepad, or even with a machine gun…”.
Earlier, we told about the photo contest The World Through the Eyes of Indigenous Peoples, which was headed by the famous photographer, ethnographer and traveler Alexander Khimushin. We also reported that Norilsk celebrated the 90th anniversary of the birth of the local photographer Vladimir Chin-Mo-Tsai with a virtual exhibition, and a modern photography laboratory was opened at the Academy of Creative Industries.
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Text: Denis Kozhevnikov, Photos: Denis Kozhevnikov and Nikolay Shchipko
