The Lucent Logbook

Back to Russia

Toomas — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:01:27 +0000

In early July I had a chance to visit once again the countryside of North Russia in the Arkhangelsk region. This time I was there for the festival of arts and handicrafts called KenArt (akin to Kenozero National Park and Art). It was a colourful event with lots of participants and volunteers from a number of countries. The idea of the festival was to create objects of land-art and wooden sculptures to be placed in the landscape. These were nicely made and some of them were true masterpieces, but honestly, they looked very controversial in the calm landscape. Controversial in the sense they did not suite there. While the local people were the real ones. Those who belong to the landscape. Needless to say, most of the time I chased local characters with my camera.

Paris

Toomas — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:39:17 +0000

It is difficult to say anything about Paris which is not said before and which would not sound banal. The same applies to photographing this city. I spent last week in Paris and — fortunately — I was there not for photography, but for some other work. Although I always had the camera in my bag, I hardly had any feel for taking it out. Only one afternoon I happened to be on a touristic track and forced myself to cover the topic of the city crowded with foreign faces.

The book: business and nature

Toomas — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:51:41 +0000

In June 2009 we published the book BUSINESS FROM AND FOR NATURE, which is a result of two-years work and good cooperation of many people, while main contributers were Toomas Kokovkin (photography and editing) and Charlie Avis (text and ideology). The book captures some of the experiences gained through WWF International’s “One Europe More Nature” programme, which has been running since 2003 across the European continent.

Inspired by WWF Netherlands, the programme set out to prove that nature and business can go together, that business can be made from nature whilst at the same time conserving or restoring the special places with which we are blessed. The programme set out to show how different industries, even seemingly quite destructive industries, can profit from our natural environment whilst contributing to – in fact driving – the conservation of our valuable habitats and species.

This book documents, in pictures, those success stories from every corner of the continent (and even Morocco) in particular focussing on the people who made it happen and on the day-to-day activities which built success. The PDF version of the book can be downloaded here (16 MB).

Business From and For Nature

editor Toomas Kokovkin

texts Charlie Avis

design Jaana Ratas

photograps © Toomas Kokovkin (if not indicated otherwise)

published by Pelagis, Estonia

printed in Estonia by Printon

Publishing of the book is financed by the WWF International

ISBN 978-9985-9583-3-9

The ice road

Toomas — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:15:50 +0000

Do you know what is the feel of an island? The insulation that creates the feeling of abandonment, as well as security. Being simultaneously a castaway and a householder. Being free from all ties and being tied to a small peace of land. And then, in a cold winter, comes the ice road. The 25 km long road to the mainland. The road over the sea which you are used to sail avoiding every shallow. Now you drive the sea. A couple of months it lasts, and then in March the melting waters cover the ice and turn it back to the sea. It happens once in about five years, that you get your ice road and loose your feel of an island for a while, to come back to your normal state by spring, to the secure and hesitant state of an islander.

Old power plant

Toomas — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:09:09 +0000

There is an old power station which supplied electricity for the island thirty years ago. People say it was continuous rumble, day and night, in the neighbourhood, but everibody got used to it. Today it is silent, and the engines are kept as a memory of older times, but heavy smell of fuel oil is still in the machine rooms. Last summer the power station was converted into a theatre. The play was about people who worked in the peower station, about their relations, thoughts, feelings, love and dream.
I was asked to photograph the power station for the theatre’s advertisement. It turned out that it was much more challenging than I expected. My wish was to show the beauty there, to find the esthetics of this industrial environment, and to give a feeling of bygone times, but also I needed some hints of life, of labour. And also the thatricality of the place. You know, it was not that easy. It was not like taking (literally, TAKING) some pictures from these rooms and done. Maybe I am too solicitous, but it took me sevral days to get used to the surrounding and to start loving it. Then I got addicted and wanted to stay alone in the silent empty plant. Finally I got some pictures which I liked. Here are some of them for your consideration.

Москва

Toomas — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:20:06 +0000

If someone asks me to characterise Moscow in one word, my answer is ready: it is an eclectic city. This, as I understand it, means that it is composed of parts from various origins that do not necessarily match with one another. Moscow is like a pile of things, buildings, vehicles, pipes, signs, words, icons and people which come from different directions of the huge country and compose this turbulent city without any clear understanding about the purpose of doing so. No doubt this city is a quintessence of Russia. The country which is not sure wether it is in Europe or in Asia. The people that live simultaneously in aristocratic feudalism, naive Soviet autarchy and agitated postmodern commercialism. The nation that always runs into controversy when tries to define itself. And sadly, where the only hold of rulers’ ideology seems to be the war which took place already seventy years ago.

Maramureš, Romania

Toomas — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:37:41 +0000

I remember how I happened to be a guest in a mountain shepherds’ camp. That morning I went out to shoot landscapes with herds of sheeps and cows. I was too brave to get close to sheep, and a dog attacked me. The dog was very angry indeed — I could easily be a wolf — but fortunately I had a stick, which allowed me about 1 meter of untroubled world around me. I even tried to photograph, but it did not work out. So we stood there, me with the stick and the dog with the teeth. After a while a shepherd came to rescue me and invited into their camp, a fenced area around a robust hut and simple raw cheese installations. There were three more men there, not young, tough, seasoned.

We did not talk at all. Not because we had no common topics, for sure we had. But we could not find any common language, even my scientific Roman did not help with their highland Romanian. So I got my lamb soup and was left alone because they went to do — you know what? — to milk the sheep of course! That was something you should have seen.

Milking. The queue of sheep is waiting behind man's backs.

Three men milking several hundreds of sheep. It was arranged ingeniously, something like the Ford’s roll conveyor. The technique is difficult to explain here in words, you better see the pictures. Anyway, it took about ten seconds per sheep, in total more than half an hour. As I learned later, they have to do it three times per day! Wake up, milk, herd out, herd in, milk, herd out, herd in, milk, good night. Some milk fermenting and cheese boiling inbetween. And I thought shepherd is one of most relaxed professions. Of course some clever dogs help them during the day.

Notice THE dog and its still distrustful eyesight.

Most of my travels last year were because of preparing a book about small businesses in nature areas, the project of WWF International called One Europe More Nature. The book is by now ready and its PDF version can be seen here (Size 16 MB).

Exhibition to Lithuania

Toomas — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:49:04 +0000

In October 2009 I sent a small selection of photographs for the exhibition in Lithuania. The exhibition venue is in the Rehabilitation Hospital of Palanga, and from there will move in early 2010 to the Art Gallery of Telšiai town.

You may want to see the slideshow of the photographs sent to the exhibition here.

My first photo book

Toomas — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:36:14 +0000

I tell you about my first photographic book. Publishing books and brochures was not an unknown sphere for me, but when I planned to publish a purely photographic book, which meant special visual language and layout and format etc, I needed to learn about it. So, in 2003 I went to the Toscana Photographic Workshop (very inspiring place!) to attend the class of David Alan Harvey entitled “Creating a Photographic Book”. David is a very talented person and what he is doing nowadays with the Burn Magazin, inspiring the aspiring photographers, is estimable. Unfortunately he did not like my pictures, and therefore found very little time to deal with me. In exchange I thought that his approach to a book creation was a bit simplified. It was mostly about editing the sequence, while the format and design issues were left out. But I needed more, because I think a book is not a slideshow, it is not that linear, one can enter a book from any page. Anyway, it was his first class about book making, and I am sure next years it was more varying.

I suppose it was David who suggested me to photograph in the Bar Centrale, at the central square of San Quirico. He probably noticed me spending time there. When shooting, I had white wine mixed with water (never did it before or later, but I had to stay in working condition), and was sitting there long hours. The table napkins in the bar were of thick brown paper, and there I got my eureca: I would make the REAL book, the TANGIBLE one, out of materials available in the bar! The Friday morning before the final show of the workshop I worked mostly with box cardboard, napkins, glue and scissors. And edited my prints into this book. I hope David was happy to see that somebody followed literally the topic of his class. This nice remembrance is now on my bookshelf among other photographic literature. After my return from Italy I made also a little web-page about this funny book.

Kenozero, North Russia

Toomas — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:33:48 +0000

This northern perifery used to be the richest region of Russia with its salt and timber production and trade shipping over Arctic seas. Soviet empire introduced to this region huge prison camps and cut the cultural roots. I’ve heared that according to Russian historians the northern villages has already passed the no-turn point of degradation. After my travel in August 2009 I do not beleive this opinion. The people in these villages want to recreate their deep culture and their traditions. I do hope they will.

Even if you think you know Russia (as I do), you get much to reconsider in the villages of the North. A night train from Moscow plus several hours in a bus along the gravel roads, and you get to the another world. A vanished world, if you will. The villages arount Kenozero lake. Friendly, tranquil people, living in big log-houses, going to small wooden churches, boating big rivers and lakes surrounded with dense boreal woodlands.

Deeper insight into local culture will tell you about the northern and scandinavian dimensions (look at their boats, they are a viking type!), identification with the medieval Novgorod republic destroyed by muscovites, the mixture of orthodox and pagan traditions. For instance, there has never been a serfdom of peasants in these regions, and women had equal rights since long. And — was it my imagination or reality — there were very few soviet remnants in these villages, not like in more southern areas. I even noticed a kind of memory blackout in local society. Whenever I asked people about history, they started talking about early 20th century, and older times, but nothing about the Soviet era. I had an impression that they want to go on with their lives from somwhere where their culture was interrupted. Or was it just my wishful thinking?