Photography in Central Asia

Have you ever watched a news story and observed the camera folks filming each other? It’s like when they run out of things to shoot they pan the camera to the press pool to show the other people covering the event. I always wondered why they do that until I started walking around Bishkek with my friend Paul, a fellow photographer. In Bishkek there are hardly any places which inspire us, especially in winter when everything is so bleak. Bleakness is sometimes cool to photograph but Bishkek takes the definition to a whole new level which even modern cameras can’t capture.

So it wasn’t long before we were shooting each other. Here we are respectively. Paul got a nicely framed shot of me photographing him while standing atop a broken hot water pipe. I got him on the railroad tracks heading back.