Wandering Eyes: William Snyder's Siberia
Oct. 10, 2000 -- In a gesture of pure happiness, as well as surprise, a boy stood in a snowdrift in Siberia and cradled a perfect watermelon, the fruit becoming an extension of his belly. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer William Snyder, glimpsing the scene, was elated.
And he took a picture. Snyder’s photo of the boy and his watermelon is indicative of much of the photojournalist’s work, capturing a quiet intensity and an entire story in what, at first glance, looks like a simple composition.
As the eye wanders around the photo’s central figure, a story unfolds — one of joy in a traditionally isolated land marked by poverty, rampant entrepreneurialism and Western corporate influence.
“My job is to go into a situation where I am a complete stranger and ask, ‘Can I follow you around and stick a camera in your face and get you to ignore me,’” Synder says. “That’s not always easy. It’s pretty difficult to not make people uncomfortable, and I am not even sure how I have developed my own way of coping with that.”
The Dallas, Texas-based photographer has traveled far to capture life dramatically removed from his own, having documented the despair of Romanian orphanages, the intricacies of airplane crash investigations and the intensity of the Barcelona Olympic Games. For those assignments he won three Pulitzer Prizes, one in the category of Explanatory Journalism, another in Feature Photography and the third in Spot News Photography.
A more recent faraway trek of Snyder’s was to ride the Trans-Siberian Express in 1996, a time of great uncertainty in Russia. [See interactive link at right.]
Traveling with Gregory Katz, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News, Gregory’s wife and a translator, Snyder set out to capture a sense of the Russian heartland, a picture of the country’s past, and the effects of change and upheaval in some of the more remote areas of the country.
The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest continuous rail line on earth, passing through Yaroslavl on the Volga, the Urals, Irkutsk near the southern end of Lake Baikal, and Khabarovsk. And at each turn and stop there is a clamor with a rhythm that can override the senses.
“You can take the trip from Moscow to Vladivostok in one fell swoop and it takes six and a half days,” says Snyder. “It’s a beautiful trip and the train becomes one big party. People bring all kinds of food on the train, and vodka — enormous amounts of vodka.
“We were going to take the train to see what the people were saying about Russia and the economic turmoil that was going on in the country,” he continued. “Russia was really in the midst of huge change. The Mafia was really strong and we wanted to go to the heartland, like when reporters go to Kansas or Illinois to see where people’s heads are.”
Getting Inside the Heartland
Religious revival was strong in the heartland of Russia. “We were interested in seeing how traditional religions of the world were doing, and where Judaism, Catholicism, Islam and Buddhism were along the route,” Snyder notes.
On their stop in Vladivostok the journalists found Dan Maurer, an American Catholic priest who travels two hours from the Russian Far East seaport of Vladivostok to give communion to a tiny parish in Bolshoi Kamen, a closed, Soviet-era military city. St. John the Apostle Church, a converted apartment, is the first house of worship in the city.
Snyder also found an autonomous Jewish region once set up by Stalin experiencing a revival, and a temple of Buddhist monks.
The photos Snyder took of the world he found on the Trans-Siberian are open — not always full of hope, but teeming with juxtapositions of new and old, of gray landscapes with flashes of brilliant blocks of color. Smiling close-ups surrounded by a mass of wrinkles and foggy eyes tell of a land cloaked in uncertainty holding on to any amount of light it can catch. Everything feels like it’s just a matter of time.
“The photo that I took of a child smiling holding onto a watermelon in the middle of the snow in Siberia is typical of the kinds of images that are common along the train,” Snyder says. “If you live along the rail then things like watermelon and fruit are accessible. People bring in all kinds of things because they know they can sell them at some stops along the rail. So, you will see people with bags of Tyson chicken and sodas. If you live farther in the interior, you don’t have these things at your disposal.”
A Photographer’s Bag
Snyder took 150 rolls of film on his trip. He doesn’t develop the film on the road; instead, he takes the rolls home and looks at the photos then. “I was getting to a point on the Trans-Siberian trip where I was rationing my film. Generally, I prefer to use the slowest film I can get away with for the better quality and grain. So, I would look at my film and decide how much I could use that day and then decide what I was going to photograph.”
The slower-speed film also helps Snyder achieve his minimum depth of field photos. He likes to keep his images simple so there is an easy point of entry for the viewer into a picture. “As long as something brings you into a picture I can then layer [elements] and use a juxtaposition of elements, so that people who look at them will wander around and look into the shadows and edges and find the story.”
Snyder works with short lenses mostly, bringing as little equipment to a scene as possible to keep his subjects more comfortable. “When I am working I have a camera on each shoulder and kind of hide them by slinging them along my back,” he says. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of being a photographer. I found that when I used the smaller lenses and cameras, I could get people to relax more around me. I don’t want to be in my pictures. The thing I am looking to capture is just life.”
A Little Old Man
Snyder began taking photos when he was in seventh grade in Henderson, Ky. His English teacher assigned the class to go out and photograph something and write about it. Ever since then, Snyder has been living with photos.
“It was something I found that I could do pretty well,” he says. “I was such an old man at 12. I just knew this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to go out and meet people and take pictures of everything: sporting events, war zones, the local pottery club.”
The defining moment for Snyder as a photographer and a journalist was when he decided to go to Romania and photograph children left in orphanages.
“My boss and I had a disagreement on the value of this story, so I arranged it all myself and did it all on my own,” Snyder says. “It taught me how to do this job on a really deep level.
“Up to that point, I think I was a photographer who was interested in pictures and stories. But there comes a point when a real journalist sees that the things they do really can affect people — that it hurts a story if you try and cram everything into it that’s not always necessary.
“What I learned from Romania is that you go into a place and you try tell the story through the eyes of the people living it. Unfortunately, television — a medium reliant on pictures — has gone a long way in creating an ethic that says you create the story and then move on.”