Frostbite & Focusing: Shooting Ufa's Soviet Squalor Like It's 2003 Again

cold is the first narrator here. woken not by birdsong but by the brittle crunch of scraping ice off my tripod lens. 1°S, feels-like-minus-1 so i started hunting for those few golden hours before sweater weather fully inhales my milk tea. turns out the local hosers here make great drinking companions-asked a cabbie to pose with my 300mm for coin, he nailed it. turns out his parka is made of last winter’s skid row tears.

*dacha district, where old men sit on riverbank benches like smoking crows. heard that from my cousin’s barista in novosibirsk-a detail that’ll 100% win me friends here. forgot sunscreen, get that creamy zong pink my camera flash struggles to capture. who’s dumb enough to wander this far without layers? me? look, i’m here writing this, probably.

mtiner mountains peek through cloud, sharp like broken glass. scouted new album cover ideas by the metro station-graffiti of a bear in a welder’s jacket. tagged mine in red on the back of a ~15,000kg truck’s hydraulic arm. woke up in a banya tonight, hair smelling like fermented oats. best way to pack a camera lens? your spit. ¡seriously!? (source: drunk rigger at railroad bar)

friends near stores: okeydok, these are the real 🇷🇺s. stroll past rusted skulls at the war memorial, no fights. ‘melania’s got a cousin here,’ i’m told. merry. [youtube.com/watch?v=12345] [tripadvisor.com/Ufa]_ [vk.com/ufasentimental]

gear checklist: • 24mm fisheye (for grimy alleyways)
• lens pen (the cracked glass won’t clean itself)
• hand warmers hidden in my milk chocolate granola bars
shot 12 rolls of 35mm yesterday. all vignettes. every person here’s a wandering ghost, shrugging at the cold. tomorrow: follow the stray dogs through the cemeteries. they’re better guides than the maps. freeze your ass off with me.

p.s. my grandmother’s sewing machine is older than the nearest Starbucks. “that’s my boy*,” she’d say, if she could hear my single-leg squats warming up. ⤶️

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