Fine Art Tuesday

 

Sogdian village in the Yagnob valley. Notable for how the forage is stored on top of the roofs of the buildings and weighted down with rocks.

Leonid Plotkin is a photographer who posts his work on Flickr. He traveled through Central Asia in 2012 and took photographs of ordinary people.

I was attracted to this artist because where else are you going to find pictures of Sogdians and villages in the Yagnob valley?

The Sogdians dominated the Silk Road for a period of time that spans from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eight century. Over the centuries they were diluted and beaten back to the Yagnob valley.

Then the Soviet economy demanded near-slaves in the cotton fields east of the Caspian Sea. The Soviets forced them out of their villages to work in the deserts. They kept running away from the forced labor camps. Source

Seventeen villages, 500 Sogdians total. Life is spread thinly upon the ground.

Steep sheep

A party of groomsmen going to collect the bride.

This image and the the remainder of the images were taken in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Potatoes! Kashka Suu. Garden plots are between 10,000 square feet to 22,000 square feet and appear to be planted to a single crop. The typical dwelling has about 2000 square feet of adobe outbuildings "shotgun shacked" to the back end of them and serve as a divider between plots.*

Potatoes on the extreme left. Notable for the barbed wire fence, the bread oven behind subject's right shoulder and the source of irrigation water running between the two men.

Summer pasture. Give till it yurts.

Detailed view of the inside of the yurt. Notable for the framework and the interesting stove. The relatively tall, narrow firebox would be conducive to many kinds of fuel while the long, horizontal plenum would be good for heat transfer and cooking.

An image older than time. In austere environments there is no such thing as retirement. This granny will be productive until she dies. Much of Kyrgyzstan looks like central Montana.

While some might argue that these photos don't qualify as "Fine Art", I find them a thousand times more engaging than portraits of rich, vain people wearing uncomfortable costumes.

* A random neighborhood in Kashka Suu:

The street orientation is not random. They follow irrigation ditches. The town is on an alluvial fan where a mountain stream flows into a larger river. 7000 feet elevation. The headwaters of the mountain stream are approx 14,000 feet some 7 miles to the north.