Month: November 2017

“The Birds”

Artist Unknown, Minimalist Movie Poster: Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”

The film premiered March 28, 1963 in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art hosted an invitation-only screening as part of a 50-film retrospective of Hitchcock’s film work. The MOMA series had a booklet with a monograph on the director written by Peter Bogdanovich. The film was screened out of competition in May at a prestigious invitational showing at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival with Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren in attendance.

The Fisherman with the Red Hat

Photographer Unknown, (The Fisherman with the Red Hat)

“The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible
call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without.”

–Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “One of Those Rare Smiles:

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” 

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Coated with Sand

Photographer Unknown, (Coated with Sand)

“We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood — between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.”
― Robert Ingersoll

Dancers: Marusya Night Club

Denis Sinyakov, “Dancers from the Marusya Night Club, Moscow”, Photo Shoot

Born in Moscow in 1977, Denis Sinyakov is a Moscow based freelance photographer and videographer. He has had twenty years of experience in still and film photography including four years with the Agence France Press from 2003 to 2007 and five years with Reuters from 2997 to 2012, both based in Moscow. He also has a history of freelance work as photographer and videographer. 

Sinyakov has done work for Der Speigel magazine; Helsingin Sanomat, Liberation, News week, Sunday Times, CNN, Al Jezeera, Geo, TV Rain, the Medoza Project, and Greenpeace, International. Sinyakov places an emphasis on social and environmental issues, with a particular focus on the former Soviet republics and Russia. 

On the 19th of September in 2013, Denis Sinyakov and twenty-eight crew members of Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise were captured by Russian Federal Security Service agents in an international waters. He had been covering protest actions against oil exploration in the Arctic. Sinyakov, another journalist and the crew members were accused of piracy and then of hooliganism. Sinyakov was sentenced to two months in prison in Murmansk and then in Saint Petersburg. On the 24th of December in 2013, Russia granted amnesty to all thirty hostages from the Arctic Sunrise icebreaker.

Note: The Marusya is a nightclub-cabaret for women that is located in central Moscow. In addition to dancing routines and drink, special entertainments are arranged for single prosperous women willing to pay for private attention and time with a handsome male employee of the club. According to club rules, a man is required to stay with the female guest anywhere between half an hour to a couple of hours, depending on how much she pays.