November 30, 2014
Defending Elena Filatova
Over the last year or so, since we wrote a blurp about Elena Filatova on this blog, I've randomly run across some unsavory words about Elena across the web. It appears some peeps want to think Elena is a fraud.
I'm not buying it. In the first place Elena's photography is photojournalism, it's not piped up with Photoshop for some fraud attack. Get real people. It borders on slander and public slander, and unless you have proof, you shouldn't publish stuff like that.
Lastly, getting permission to enter a site to photograph is not fraud. I have. Other's have. One example we've already published here. And it's actually sometimes the right thing to do in some circumstances.
Breaking and entering doesn't make you or anyone a photojournalist, an explorer or a historian. It's make you a person committing a B and E. And whether Elena had permission or not doesn't take a way one iota of the decade of heart she put into her mission.
We see the beauty in decay and the shadowed dreams of the forgotten.