I was in Bishkek again last month and the temperatures varied between -18f and 25f. Just before sunrise I took this picture from the stairway window that had the glass broken out, on the top floor of my friends apartment building. While snapping away a few shots and adjusting some settings, my hands turned purple from the cold. Wind was howling through the opening which muffled the sounds of a large man who came up from behind me. In Russian he asked me what was I doing (which I could only infer since my Russian stinks). Startled and intimidated, I could only show him the preview of the last picture I took (this one here) — to which he replied in broken English “no camera here — go!” Guess he didn’t like the picture.

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.