Alexander Zaitchik

Mexico's Migrant Mountain

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:59:00 +0000

This is a scene from my night as a pay-to-play migrant in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo. The article, from the February 2009 issue of Reason, is here. (Photo by Jacobo Braun, the best shooter in Distrito Federal.)

Greenland

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:01:00 +0000

Just about everything you need to know about Greenland is in this picture. Everything else is in my "Greenland Dispatch."

Azerbaijan

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:28:00 +0000

This is the skyline of Baku as seen through the trash-fire haze of the outer Balakhani oil fields. The oil fields are mostly used up, but a few pumps continue to operate amidst the ghost derricks and the burning dump. Baku is regularly rated the most polluted city in the world. This old woman is standing on a side street in Sumgayit, the former hub of Azeri chemicals production. One of the main tourist draws here is a Baby Cemetery honoring those who died in infancy as a result of Soviet pollution, which was of a magnitude worse than it is even today. My article about oil and human rights in Azerbaijan is here.

2008 New Hampshire Primary

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:52:00 +0000

This little girl turned around and looked at me right as I was focusing a shot on Obama from across the distance of an airplane hanger. I have no idea how or why she settled on my camera among all the others. The next day I attended a Mike Huckabee rally starring Chuck Norris, which I wrote about here.

Lyovikha, Southern Urals

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 11:31:00 +0000

These four kids live in the crumbling mining ghost-settlement of Lyovikha, about an hour outside the southern Urals city of Nizhny Tagil. Constructed in the 1920s to house miners who plied the Urals of iron ore, today Lyovikha is a hellhole of 80-plus percent unemployment, fetus-warping alcoholism, and recreational violence. I visited the town while reporting a story on Lyovikha's most famous son: Eddie Chudinov, the ringleader of a pimp gang responsible for the deaths of dozens of area teenage girls. Though many of these girls were found in the forest bordering Lyovikha, residents like Oleg Masgalin (second from left) just shrugged it off. "There's a lot of violence here," he said. "Most people have never been sober in their lives. Come back at night and see how this place turns to Hell." The story is here.

Bihar, India

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:23:00 +0000

This is an anti-police brutality protest in Jehanabad, a city in the Bihar region of India. As detailed in this article, there is a bloody battle raging in Bihar and down the long stretch of India known as the "Naxal Belt," a reference to the Maoist Naxalite insurgents that have been waging war against the police and landowning castes for decades. The peasants, not all of whom support the Naxals, are often caught in the middle between the Maoists and the police, who are aligned with the landowners. Taken in December 2005.

Arizona-Mexico Border

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:13:00 +0000

This is a plot of land in Yuma, Arizona as seen from the Mexican side of the border. The Minutemen were supposedly building a fence to "stop the invasion," but all they did with their supporters' money was stick a bunch of poles and an American flag in the ground. A brief article from my time in the Southwest reporting on the Minutemen and the border debate can be found here.

Muslumovo, Southern Urals

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:42:00 +0000

One of many concrete radiation signs dotting the rural landscape around the city of Chelyabinsk, in the southern Urals. My article about the tragic and little-known situation is here.

Enter the OMON

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Zaitchik) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:03:00 +0000

This picture I just like. An old man lowers his head as he walks past a row of OMON, Russia's special police, during an anti-Kremlin protest in downtown Moscow. A few weeks after its bloody suppression of the protest, the government held a bizarre meet-and-greet between OMON and the press, where this picture was taken. The article is here.