walking almaty
vernacular | visual culture by dennis keen
When I moved to Almaty to study Kazakh in the summer of 2013, I lived on Seifullin and Mametova in one corner of the downtown core, the university was a long diagonal away, on the opposite side of the city. Every day three miles each way; every day a new route, a different zig-zag across town. There were patterns in the public space that baffled me: what is this ragged stone, full of fossils, that is used on the faces of all the buildings? What’s the story with all the little canals lining the streets, and why are some full of water and some full of trash? Why so many pharmacies? I spoke Russian and Kazakh, but urban Almaty seemed to be written in a language I couldn’t understand. Walking Almaty is the project that emerged from these wonderings and wanderings. It’s about learning to read a city’s visual landscape; I’ve taken the forms around me, filed them as dozens of folders, taking thousands of photos to document everything I deem a phenomenon. I’ve now been in Almaty for more than a year. On all my walks, I’ve had a lot of time to think; this all will become a book some day. For now, you can explore my photo albums at www.walkingalmaty.com
addresses
On many buildings, the plaques are doubled or tripled up, as new designs were installed without dismantling the old ones. The older Soviet signs tend to be light-blue, with utilitarian stenciled spray-paint, while new plaques, harkening the country’s capitalist transformation, often feature lit-up bank logos. The cruel irony is that despite the overabundance of address plaques on some building corners, many apartment blocks remain obscurely marked, and very few taxi drivers or passing pedestrians pay the addresses any regard. It seems to me that locals prefer to use landmarks – ‘It’s a block downhill from School 152.’ When my urban explorations started moving out to more suburban spaces, I noticed that a lot of the private homes had rusty plaques that doubled as lamps. Most were so old that they had been painted over, with the addresses written again in a personal scrawl. Fans of Soviet signs have written that these lamps, used all over the Soviet Union, can be dated to the decades after WWII. Another site, however, which still sells these lamp-plaques under the label retro , claims they were introduced to Moscow and St. Petersburg as early as the 1920s. Some posters at Vse.kz have presented evidence that Almaty’s signs were all originally light-blue or black; most have since turned ferrous brown or are bleached clean with whitewash. The lamp-plaques are concentrated in certain neighbourhoods, elsewhere homeowners tend to fashion their own solutions. Sometimes this means chalk or marker written straight on the gate, other places a city-provided number plate has been provided. Some plaques are store-bought. My favorites are the signs that show some love and attention. They are subtle identity markers, begging the voyeuristic questions that always cloud my mind on my long walks: Who drew that elegant seven? What made them take the time to brush in their street name themselves? What do they dream at night?
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