Reactor

It is not a question of choice: everyone reads what they have to.

Reading about the arrest of the alleged Russian spy Paul Hampel (operating from Montreal), I have found in one of the articles a note that among other activities he used to produce his ‘legend’ was taking pictures and publishing them. Further research on some Belgrade media sites uncovered the name of the book - “My Beautiful Balkans” - and this site to which you can find the link below.

I visited his site and found a set of nice pictures (a very good training, indeed - I wonder if someone would one day be able to collect and publish the best spy photos through the ages). But it’s not so much their quality that prompted me to write something here, as the atmosphere in them and the themes that he was interested in.

Hampel, in his brief notes (I hope, for the sake of his career, that he was more detailed in his official writings), talks mostly of the beauty of Balkans, the place he apparently fell in love with, but majority of his images show, between the shapes, the author’s craving for normality. In Belgrade, he takes photos of young couples kissing, a small girl on the street (with somewhat Russian features), an old woman walking in the snowstorm, a dog lying in the dry leaves (this photo he named ‘Old Age’). I can see longing for family in these. I can see his concern for the future - what do old spies do when they retire? Are they thrown with dry leaves to the garbage of history? Church towers from many angles. Lots of snow scenes without people in his pictures - solitude, reminiscence, peace. In his Moraca Note, from Montenegro, he claims he felt ‘uplifted’ standing by the old monastery. This prompted me to think he, perhaps, was just another ‘Slavic soul’, and in love with all things Orthodox, but he has equally telling pictures from Albania, for example.

At this point in time I don’t know if he was a spy or no. There are not many details published from the court proceedings anyway, and they probably will never be made public. I certainly hope that, if he’s been a real spy, his actions did not cause someone’s suffering or death. But from the artistic point of view, I would buy him a beer if we met. Surely, many of his images are made to look nice next to a meter of red books and two meters of blue ones on the shelf made to measure in a nouveau rich house, but the feelings in them are another story.

My Beautiful Balkans [note: the site has been removed!]