On my way back from Svaneti to Tbilisi a couple of weeks ago, I had a few hours to kill in Zugdidi, arriving before noon and leaving after 5pm. This was mostly because, as I had done on the reverse journey up a week earlier, I would be doing the trip between Zugdidi and Tbilisi by train. It’s marginally cheaper, breaks up the journey, and is way more comfortable too; I would do the whole thing by train every time if the tracks went that far. I had just arranged a ride down to the main road connecting our village with the Zugdidi road, then hitchhiked the 2.5 hours to the capital of Samegrelo, not even bothering to book anything.
Leaving most of my baggage in the railway station’s Left Luggage gave me freedom to walk unencumbered for a few Lari. After lunching, I went to the city’s main steelyard, which has been an important materials supply location for our Svaneti renovation and building work in the last decade. So they know me there, although this was the first time I had asked just to wander around and shoot photos of all that lovely rust. No worries.
This steelyard is maybe a tenth the size of the one I have visited several times in Tbilisi’s Eliava industrial district. But there is still plenty to explore and capture on my camera. I suppose the main thing I had to avoid was bootprints on the stacks of sheet steel; but they were not a major encumbrance. Here, too, is where my favorite images come from: Not the bars or I-beams, which tend to be more heavily rusted- the bluish-tinted sheets with only slight corrosion are where the magic happens.
Some of my best images from this hour-long jaunt include a creature spreading its huge wings, about to fly off. Not a bird, necessarily, because its head is more like a human-shaped thing.
There is a happy couple, maybe just after getting married, aglow with warm colors.
A rather scary teddy bear, like something out of the recent horror film about Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey, which I have no interest in seeing. But there he was.
The hint of a man’s head looking right, more present in the outline than interior details. I might just photoshop a profile photo of me into this and see how it looks. (This one has given me the most reactions from the Zugdidi set I posted onto Facebook’s Rust Art group, over 800).
One I call “Lazarus Emerging from the Tomb,” although I do still invite viewers to see what they will and apply their own titles to these abstract pieces.
One of the workers had to use an angle grinder to cut a couple of large sections off a big steel sheet while I was there. I waited, far enough away that the noise wouldn’t be painful, for him to finish so I would get a first look at the sheet underneath, a first-time experience for me, kind of like those “unboxing a new product” videos on YouTube. There wasn’t much there, but the cut had magnetized all the steel particles into thin lines of attraction between two of the sheets, which was interesting to see.
As always, my main edits of the shot images were: Cropping to straighten slightly angled lines and eliminate distracting edge details; intensification and correction of the existing colors and contrast. I just strengthen what is there. Rust does the rest.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
