Miron Zownir & Nico Anfuso
Down & Out

Published in: Down and Out in Moscow, Pogo Books, Berlin 2014

Back in 1995, you went to Moscow for three months for Hamburg’s Erotic Art Museum to document the nightlife of the rich and the beautiful. You changed your mission objective at the last minute. Why was it more important to you to show life on the street?

Well, because what was going on in the streets was pure insanity. As soon as I stepped off the train, drunken, crazy or totally desperate people started staggering into me. Some of them were having complete breakdowns in the middle of the crowd and others still were hiding, half-obscured, shivering and paranoid in the train station’s forlorn corners. That was my very first impression, which only deepened in time and left me no other choice but to document these horrors. It was so obvious and public, yet most passers-by, uniformed authorities, the press and the new Kremlin powers simply ignored the issue. At that point, Moscow’s nightlife seemed so banal and commonplace that I spontaneously and independently decided to change my mission. 

Post-Soviet Russia was in the middle of a transformational crisis at the time. Everywhere you looked you found the ill, desperate and homeless, even dying and dead. Were you shocked by the dramatic negative social consequences of making that switch from a planned to a market economy?

Sure, I was shocked by the idea that people would simply be kicked out into the wilds of capitalism without any warning or support. Communism never appealed to me either, but the transition was so cynical and merciless that the question just has to be asked: Why did the West, after quite loudly criticizing the Soviets for 45 years, keep so quiet and subdued during the transition phase, completely and pathetically failing once again. The Western governments were obviously more concerned with signing lucrative contracts with the new strong capitalistic Russia than to denounce the insufferable deficits and down-right crimes against humanity. One or two years later, around 96/97, the Russian authorities began to rounding up the homeless. Like dogcatchers they loaded the down-and-out into buses and vans and dropped them back out in the Russian backwaters. Their heads were shaved, they were deloused for the deportation and then left to  themselves. The result, naturally, being good for the statistics, because the number of homeless in Moscow  suddenly dropped so remarkably that it was hardly worse off than any western capital. Perhaps there were also other measures taken, but to experience how these ailing and dying people were ignored in their supreme suffering was something that struck to the very core of my existence, which is probably also the reason that I still photograph homeless people whenever I’m confronted with them. 

After the USSR fell apart, poverty rose in the nineties to above 40 percent of the population. Mortality rates also went up dramatically. Is there anything that is less dignifying than dying in public?

To be murdered in one’s own bed or being tortured to death in prison is probably not any more dignified. But that’s the level that we are talking about here: a crime against the most ignorant and weakest in society. They were left to freeze or starve or die of thirst on the street and simply ignored or harassed when they tried to make themselves noticed. Apparently no one came up with the idea to send a mobile soup kitchen around to the hot spots, especially the train stations. For years, there must not have been enough homeless shelters nor voluntary doctors to take care of people in need. If there were such initiatives then they had been done privately, and I’ve never heard of anything like that happening. The whole logistical and humanitarian deficits are still a complete riddle to me. 

You did portraits of some people whom you later found dead. How did that feel?

Helpless and angry, right away. It generated a general tension and strange feeling of fearful anticipation, when I realized that these people are dying. Questions came up, like: what will happen when I come back to see this person again? Sometimes I had a naive hope that I could bring them somewhere save. Then of course, there’s that sick kick you get out of shooting an unusual photo or series, that you are an eyewitness to such a horrible experience. Altogether it’s a pretty fucked up feeling to draw something from a situation which you can’t change but which nevertheless gets under your skin. Clearly the thing to do would have been to put all my energy into somehow helping these people, but at the same time that would have been the most hopeless course of action. So, I concentrated solely on the mission I chose, pretty much like all the rest who knew about it but did nothing.

So, were you fully aware of the moral dilemma you were walking into?

Of cause but I’m not one to moralize. I cursed the situation and then photographed it. Had nightmares, but I had those before. Only, they got more concrete and didn’t stop when I woke up. The whole Moscow trip was wrapped up in some sort of anxiety, as if someone had buckled me up in a straightjacket. In situations like that you can’t moralize, you just feel very uncomfortable. And when I—on very rare occasions—was in a good mood, I didn’t suffer from a guilty conscience. I just had a couple of glasses of vodka too many, like the rest.  

While photographing, you were often confronted with armed militants and the police. What reasons did you have to keep on, inspite of the fear that you would be arrested?

With my shaved head, western clothing and camera, I was pretty conspicuous. And since I often showed up at the same places, even to the drunkest of custodians of order who always showed their presence at the train stations but actually just stood around and shooed away the homeless—it was somehow clear to them that they’d better keep an eye on me. I was obviously not pointing the camera at the officially sanctioned, presentable image of Moscow. And well, since I didn’t really want to deal with tanked AK47-toting militiamen, I made sure to shoot discretely and move about in a way that didn’t draw attention to myself. Those four or five times when I had to explain myself in English, which no one understood anyway, were situations where I was a hair’s breadth from landing in jail or getting beaten up. It was a pretty grotesque game of cat and mouse sometimes. I had to conceal what I was doing, because I was documenting an embarrassing reality. There was hardly a trace of anything like democracy, but we know how it feels here in the West, too, like when policemen beating up photographers making photos of demonstrations. I’ve been arrested in Germany for that. But giving up never occurred to me. I mean, well, I wasn’t  in Chechnya, bullets weren’t buzzing by my head. It was a situation I could cope with. 

Russia was in the middle of the First Chechen War at the time. Following the summer 1995 hostage-taking by Chechen separatists at Budjonnowsk hospital in which 150 people were killed, the fear of further guerilla actions and terrorist attacks was tangible in Moscow...

Yes, but it didn’t really affect me, since, for example, mostly dark-skinned people were being searched at subway exits. I hardly red any newspapers or watched any Russian television. There were a surprising number of wounded veterans around, but they were mostly Afghanistan veterans. Every once in a while, young rooky soldiers, shaved  with scalps gleaming, would goose step by but didn’t really give you the feeling that they were too hot on playing war.  

You’ve described Moscow as the most aggressive, most dangerous city you’ve ever been to. What was it that made you feel this way?

Everything was annoying, from shopping to riding the subway, from asking for information to all my experiences while taking photos. It was all stressful. People were arguing at every street corner. Whole hordes of frustrated people would pounce on the defenseless. Everywhere you saw bitter, aggressive people hurrying to get somewhere and nowhere. Once, I was waiting for the subway with four young Rastafarians, when all of the sudden three Russian Nazis came out of nowhere and for no reason started beating up on the Rastas in a blind rage. The subway train arrived and saved the Rastas from anything worse than a beating. Hardly a day went by without violence, and more than once I had to defend myself against crazy drunks, pimps or whatever other pissed-off nutcases. And I never did anything to provoke anyone, as far as I know. And of course, there were all these armed, uniformed idiots wandering around, and Mafiosi in big fat American cars, who could bribe their way out of any crime, desperate fools who had nothing to lose, angry veterans, potential killers on every street corner. This may all sound a bit over the top, but look at my photos: they’re not playing it up, and most of them  you can’t stand to look at.  

Did you experience any corruption or abuse of power yourself?

I can’t really remember. Well no, actually one time I was racing around Moscow early in the morning with two drunken Russians in a Cadillac. The driver got a bit excited and tossed a bottle of vodka out the window. Out of nowhere, a police car pulled up. The whole incident was smoothed over with a hundred dollar bill. Another time, this has nothing to do with corruption or abuse of power, but says something about the general situation: A guy standing at a newsstand said to me, “One dollar.” “One dollar for what?” “One dollar for bag.” He points to a dirty plastic bag and I think OK, let’s have a look at what I could buy for a dollar. And in the  bag, there were, no joke, four skulls. 

Scary and surreal, but also rather symbolic of your stay...

You could say so. I think he bought a can of beer with that dollar. 

Your photos show a great deal of empathy for these stranded people, too. You’ve dealt with poverty and its fatal consequences again and again. Why is documenting this subject so important to you? 

Of course, it’s not the only subject I deal with, you only have to take a look at my other photography books “Radical Eye” and “Valley of the Shadow”, or read my novels. But abysmal feelings, like desperation, desire, hate, fear and powerlessness, are subjects that do occupy me time and again, and since I first started doing photography, film and literature. It’s part of every societal crisis, but as you have already pointed out, poverty is an especially fatal factor. And basically, it is completely unnecessary. When you compare, for instance, how many billionaires there are who live in superabundance, how the power structures are set up and how many people live in completely inadequate, existentially threatening social conditions who have to fight for survival day to day or who don’t even have the chance to fight for their daily bread or work for their keep, you can’t just stand aside. I can’t ignore it. I just can’t walk down the street and get off on the meaningless little superficial concerns of our society. So if a viewer senses the empathy I have for the stranded people in my photos, they’re absolutely right. Even though I don’t do anything other than mercilessly document what is there, Mostly situations lots of people don’t even notice because they are too busy with themselves.

Is that what you are trying to do with your artistic work, fight against ignorance? 

That’s the necessary consequence of my work. Not exactly comparable to an armed resistance, for that I have no alternative concept and belief in collective decision-making, goals or a perfect system. For me it’s always about individual fate. You can’t always blame society or act as if you’re in the right. The fact that I’m better off than these broken-down turned-out people and the fact that I could walk away from it at any time is something that leaves you with a dialectical aftertaste, even with so much sympathy and engagement. The only way to escape from this contradiction is to make yourself a crusader for the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the lepers. But my engagement maybe doesn’t go quite far enough   for that. 

When you came back to the West after three months in Russia, how did you feel?

Right off, I was pretty exhausted and just couldn’t bear all that suffering anymore. I took the bus from St. Petersburg to Helsinki and from there to Danzig via ship, and finally took the train to Berlin. So I had plenty of time to get acclimatized. But somehow, I never really got used to the European West ever again. These little, everyday, smug, self-righteous bourgeois problems and obsessions, which are hyped up by the media, seemed to me, and still do, more or less dishonest, convenient and superficial. By that I mean the Zeitgeist, the way things are. In the East everything was determined by the daily horrors and general fear of total collapse, whereas in Germany everyone got off on this “revolution” that was staged by fat-cat politicians and which was never more dangerous than shadowboxing. There was zero risk, yet they were treated like heros: Kohl, Springer, Reagan, Yelzin,  Bush - but after the Wall came down, not a single cuckold cock-a-doodle-dooed for human rights in the East. They only patted each other on the back with their fat hands and started weaving the network of global interests, on which we are all slowly choking now. 

You are back in the East these days, and now you are aiming your eye at the Ukraine. What is your focus of interest going to be there?

Thanks to a grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation, I have the opportunity to do a volume on the Ukraine. I’m spending much of my time in the streets, but I was also in a TBC clinic, an orphanage for kids with HIV, in a morgue, several gypsy camps, etc. Of course, you can only get a narrow perspective, based on that which you experience and encounter during that short time. You just can’t live up to the monumental task of doing an objective body of work on an entire country. That’s totally impossible. You can only get across feelings, moods, nuances and impressions. Even a million subjective photos will never amount to an objective body of work. Nevertheless I am striving to go beyond my normal subjects and maybe show happier, impartial, unspectacular sides. Let’s see…