“The camera is much more than a recording device, it is a means by which messages reach us from another world”.
Cinema great Orson Welles
Gorky Park 1985
My mind felt as if I was surfing vapors from magical clouds covered in gold dust. My strides through passport control mimicked the cinematic gait of Sean Connery’s From Russia With Love James Bond. 1985 was filled with many photography firsts. Moscow was waiting.
Driving through endless Moscow squalor to my hotel, my first visual impressions were what President Reagan’s advisors knew...Russia was penniless. If there was gray squalor, it lived in Moscow.
Gorky Street 1985
Moscow
I arrived at the famed Hotel National on Red Square. I exited my taxi with a Fred Astaire pirouette (I can say that. I knew him and photographed him). My eyes touched every Russian detail. I floated inside. Russia was waiting for my camera. One million images would never be enough to capture this historical treasure.
My first breakfast was memorable for the conversational companionship that might have been. The famed actor Peter Ustinov was sitting in my view of Red Square. I was certain once I asked him to move a bit we would become lifelong friends. But instead the presumed MI 6 spy just grunted and moved an inch if that. We had breakfast everyday apart for one week.
I was greeted later that morning by my KGB (Novosti a state run news agency) guide. We visited a government building to deliver an envelope for the Industrialist Armand Hammer. Yes that Armand Hammer (#Occidental Petroleum and more). The envelope glowed in my camera bag from New York to Moscow. I was desperate to unseal the 11x14 package.
Somehow Raiders of the Lost Ark omen came to mind...Be careful what you wish for. Fortunately the government official smiled when I handed him the package and said, “I can see the seal was not broken”. I am positive the envelope contained cash or secret documents.
My Soviet objective was to capture every living cultural figure. I fell thousands or millions short. The hundreds of painters, sculptors, ballerinas, singers, conductors, writers, actors, chess grandmasters I did photograph will stay in my heart until I die.
Artist Tatyana Nazarenko
Ballerina Irina Kolpokova
For six weeks I photographed 3-4 personalities everyday. My personal driver crisscrossed the city. The Samovars fired up smoke signals across Moscow alerting the Russians to my impending arrival. The American was coming. I was greeted with vodka and “Nostrovia” from morning to night.
Russian Orthodox Church
There was a particular day I might have allowed myself to become too intoxicated. It was “May Day. The celebration of the revolution invaded my Red Square with howitzers, marching soldiers, tanks and helicopters. What I didn’t know was that the “square” would be cordoned off for the event. I still packed my camera bags for a day of photography. I naively went about my day.
After a day of shooting I had to navigate my way back to “the National” around the city circles(rings). Like the planet Saturn, you might need an added centrifugal force to power past each ring. I imagine after quantities of vodka that the Moscow urban master planner, Russian architect Osip Bove romantically set his heart on mimicking Saturn’s rings.
That night there was a dinner party in my honor. I had been shooting from dawn till darkness. My driver would no longer accommodate me. I was on foot. I ran as a camel might for the oasis. I finally arrived at Gorky Street. I was on familiar grounds.
I arrived to find howitzers parked in front of my hotel. I gleefully swung like cheetah from the first one...until a few soldiers advised against that.
I made my way to my party a bit later. It was a great evening that I hardly remember.
Late that night I realized I was lost amidst traces of Saturn’s Rings in Moscow. I imagined what Bove might have dreamed and let the stars navigate my way home.
My pants were for some reason strewn over my shoulder. I had just a few rubles in my shirt pocket.
To be continued...
I searched for Lenin everywhere