photo essay Archives | Numéro Cinq

Valentin Trukhanenko

Herewith a lovely, lively, astonishing, revelatory photo essay by the Russian photographer Valentin Trukhanenko. We have these images courtesy of Russell Working who curated and introduced the post as an accompaniment to his terrific essay “The Roommate: Vladivostok and the Ghost of Mandelstam” also published in this issue. The two pieces for a diptych, wonderful to have.

Vladivostok is so distant from Moscow, when Anton Chekhov visited in 1890, he decided to return by ship via the Suez Canal rather than face the 6,000 mile journey home on land.

Yet today it is largely ethnic Russian, a European city in a region flanked by China, North Korea, and the Sea of Japan. It is linked to the heart of the country by the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The homes are largely Soviet-style prefab concrete, and Russian traditions endure—such as children taking flowers to the teacher on the first day of school. Stalin saw to it that the Asian minority was exiled to Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Soviet Central Asia, but some have returned in recent years.

While Russia has had a Pacific outpost in Okhotsk since 1639, the port of Vladivostok –“Rule the East”—was only founded in 1860. The city’s main bay, Zolotoi Rog or Golden Horn, was named for its similarity to the Turkish waterway.

Throughout the Soviet era, Vladivostok was closed to foreigners, yet its citizens had black market access to jeans and rock ’n’ roll tapes thanks to sailors who traveled abroad. My mother-in-law even read a copy of Orwell’s 1984 that had found its way into the city in the 1970s. A friend lent it to her overnight.

—Russell Working

HORN OF PLENTY

Founded in 1860 on the site of an indigenous fishing village, Vladivostok’s Zolotoi Rog (Golden Horn) Bay is Russia’s largest Pacific seaport. It was closed to foreigners throughout the Soviet era. © 2013 Valentin Trukhanenko

BANNER YEAR

EAT YOUR VEGGIES

FREE TRADE ZONE

NINE BEAN-ROWS WILL I HAVE THERE

SUMMER DAYS

BEACH BABY

BACK TO SCHOOL

EAST MEETS WEST

A Russian sailor talks to Japanese women on Pologaya Street in prerevolutionary times. Stalin exiled tens of thousands of Vladivostok’s Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese to Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia.

OVER THERE!

Doughboys from the American Expeditionary Force Siberia joined Japanese, French, British, and Canadian troops in occupying Vladivostok in 1918 during the chaos of the Russian Civil War. One major goal was to aid 40,000 Czechoslovakian soldiers—allies of the Western powers—who had become stranded by the Revolution and were fighting their way east along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

BIRD MAN

COLD CASE

HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?

RESCUE CREW

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN

PATIENCE

GIMME SHELTER

UNDER THE SEA

ORTHODOX

— photos by Valentin Trukhanenko & captions by Russell Working

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Valentin Trukhanenko was born 1947 in the Tver region of central Russia, north of Moscow. A retired Russian Navy captain, first rank, he is a photographer with the newspaper Dalnivostochnye Vedomosti. He has been a laureate and participant in Russian and international photography exhibitions. His work has appeared internationally in Reuters, AP, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Japan Times, and other newspapers and magazines. Trukhanenko was named the best sports photographer in Russia’s far eastern Primorye region for three straight years, starting in 2005.

Russell Working is a journalist and short story writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The TriQuarterly Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines around the world. He is the author of two collections of short fiction: The Irish Martyr (University of Notre Dame Press) and Resurrectionists (University of Iowa Press). He lives in suburban Chicago and is a writer/editor at Ragan Communications, which publishes PR Daily. He lived for five years in Vladivostok, Russia. He and his wife, Nonna, have two sons.

Something self-indulgent about dg publishing these lovely Nicole Dixon photos because they reference a brooding, romantic, Heathcliff streak in him, the part of him that likes the idea of climbing Signal Hill in St. John’s, staring into the fog, and knowing there is nothing between the rock he’s standing on and Europe to the east except the vast, surging, very cold Atlantic. (Just behind you is Deadman’s Pond and just in front of you is Cuckold’s Cove—they have a way with names in Newfoundland.) There is also something satisfyingly uterine about St. John’s Harbour—ships go in and out through a narrow passage called, um, The Narrows (which you can see at the bottom of Signal Hill) while the harbour itself is, well, it all looks like an anatomy diagram dg remembers from when he was 12. DG has many writer friends in St. John’s who sometimes call him up late at night from the bars. It is also the home of the Burning Rock writing collective, an amazingly vibrant literary community with the best name ever. (Sometimes it seems St. John’s must have more writers per capita than any other place in the world.) On a personal note (as if talking about anatomy diagrams wasn’t personal enough), dg’s mother was stationed in St. John’s as a radio operator with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. He has photographs of her marching through the streets as part of the VE-Day celebrations (also pictures of the massive victory party after). She used to like to go out to Cape Spear, just south of St. John’s and the eastern-most tip of North American, and look out into the Atlantic, too.

Nicole Dixon is an estimable fiction writer, with a first story collection coming out next year (see bio below). She took these photos on a recent trip to St. John’s to attend the Atlantic Provinces Library Association conference, where she co-presented a paper on Sea Stacks (seastacks.ca), a web-resource she built to promote and disseminate information about Atlantic Canadian authors and books for children and teens. Much appreciated.

NC has a whole hybrid art theme, understated but insistent—Nance Van Winckel’s photoems, graffiti art, Domenic Stansberry’s graphic novel, and Nance’s off-the-page workshop video. We also like our art seasoned with a dash of wit and arrogance. So on this slow, droll Sunday, NC offers for your delectation a spritely, deadly comic photo essay by photographer Melissa Fisher who recently spent an afternoon in Whitehall, NY, (where the United States Navy was founded, mysteriously far from any ocean front, and a place noted for its Big Foot sightings—there is a Big Foot Liquor Store). Melissa has, in fact, a lot of affection for Whitehall where once she says, her car broke down and the local mechanic was sweet and persistently helpful as was the guy at the Sunoco station where she got a slice of pizza. She also, being from Vermont, has an affection for the backwoods, forgotten places, vestiges of older times, and the quirky things you find when you get off the main street. Whitehall proved to be a goldmine of comic signage, poignant in its juxtaposition with a kind of upstate economic decline. Her work has been published in Vermont Life and Hunger Mountain, and she has had an exhibition at After Image Studio in Montpelier.

photo by Eliza Grace Johnson

Here’s a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay from NC contributor Anna Maria Johnson and her husband, the photographer Steven David Johnson. Anna Maria Johnson is a writer, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA student, and a lovely artist in her own right. She was a co-winner of the NC Rondeau Writing Contest last year, and who can ever forget her amazing Novel-in-a-Box Contest entry? This essay is Anna Maria’s first post on Numéro Cinq as an official Contributor—we hope for many more like it. And it’s also the first time we’ve had a husband and wife team work together. It’s a wonderful addition to the growing Numéro Cinq “What it’s like living here” series.

What It’s Like Living Here–Cootes Store, Virginia

Text by Anna Maria Johnson, photos by Steven David Johnson

(Author’s Note: The locals pronounce this place “Cootes’s Store,” though the green road sign omits the possessive.)

At home on the Shenandoah River, North Fork

Home. What’s it mean? By age twenty-one, I’d lived in twenty-one places and thought home was a place I’d never find.

John Denver’s song “Country Roads” refers to western Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. This northwest corner of Virginia is where I now live, along the river’s North Fork, which runs parallel to Route 259, my road. When I travel alone, I sing the old folksong, “O Shenandoah,” and ache to be home.

Home, for me, is family: a husband and two daughters. But increasingly, “home” is becoming a specific 2.3-acre plot of land with dilapidated sheds, gardens, woods, meadow, and a white farmhouse with a front porch.

Our farmhouse. Its wood plank bedroom ceilings, steep stairs, foot-thick walls, and hand-made plank doors with old-fashioned latches hint at the log cabin our house used to be—and still is, beneath its vinyl-sided exterior and dry-walled interior. The bathroom, an aging plumber told us, was installed only in the late 1960s or 70s; he remembers doing it. The back kitchen was probably added then.

My husband, Steven, wanders down to the river nearly every day to photograph his friends—mink, herons, deer, cattle, water snakes, starlings, swallows, kingfisher, and once, three otters.

Journey’s end, back-country in British Columbia

It is an undoubted fact that in the heart of every young Canadian there lurks the impulse to pack up and drive across the country at least once. The road itself, the Trans-Canada Highway, and the immense distances beckon you. DG’s nephew, Barrett Olson-Glover, left Oakville, Ontario, just after Christmas and arrived in Vancouver New Year’s Eve. He was supposed to drive with friends, but his friends lacked the true adventurous spirit of the breed, and they abandoned him. Hence he had to take his trip photos while driving one-handed. There is just something visceral, no matter how gray, cold and alien the outlook, in photographs of the empty land. Lake Superior is mythic, the Prairies are lunar, and the mountains exude an air of being party girls who know how good they look (and yes their sheer immensity, catching the light, seems also inhuman). The back-country photos of Barrett (top and bottom of the post) in British Columbia were taken by his boarding friend Dan Robertson.