A Journey with the Camera of Soviet Journalist Nikolai Drachinsky Sudan, 1957
In 1929, twelve-year-old Kolya Drachinsky and his friend were captivated by books about Africa. Dreaming of that distant continent, they packed a sack of dried bread and set off from their small village of Safonovo in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region. The boys managed to reach Odessa, determined to board a ship bound for Africa. However, they were discovered on a cargo vessel in the port and sent home.
Nearly three decades later, in the summer of 1957, the dream finally came true. Nikolai Ivanovich Drachinsky, a renowned Moscow journalist and photographer, special correspondent for Ogonyok magazine, embarked on his first assignment in Sudan. He returned twice in 1957 and once again in 1959.
Sudan had only recently gained independence from colonial rule. It was a time of transformation, when the old and the new coexisted and it was still possible to document traditional ways of life in remote, untouched regions.
Of the several hundred negatives taken with various cameras — both 35mm and medium format, in colour and black and white — and carefully developed and selected upon his return to Moscow, only about a dozen images were ever published in Ogonyok, Around the World and Izvestia.
Drachinsky did not photograph on commission or for exhibition, but for himself — elated to set foot in a land that was even more extraordinary and mysterious than he had ever imagined in his childhood, when trees seemed taller and distant horizons were within reach.
