Elska is a project centered on traveling around the world, meeting a selection of everyday local guys, and introducing their city and their lives to readers through honest photography and personal stories. Below, photographer Liam Campbell shares exclusively with GayCities a selection of photos and behind-the-scenes commentary about some of the beautiful men he met in Tbilisi, Georgia for the latest issue…
Omo T
Although I’m sure many people would find the choice of Tbilisi as a feature city for a gay magazine to be an odd one, I’ve long wanted to use my Elska project as an excuse to visit this place. Tbilisi is one of my top five favourite cities in the world, and it’s a place I’ve been to several times before.
My first day back in Tbilisi a decade later started with Omo. We met in the Saburtalo district, a stone’s throw from where I used to have my daily Georgian lessons. The memories came flooding back as we walked past my tutor’s old office, then past the café where I often did my homework, and then past the little bookshop where I used to buy Georgian language children’s books to help advance my reading skills – a forty-page Tom and Jerry book matched the peak of my skills.
We started our shoot though outside a ‘tone’, a word that means ‘kiln’ but refers to the kind of bread bakery that is ubiquitous in the country. Inside is a partially underground oven that only makes one type of bread, a soft flat-ish loaf called ‘shotis puri’ that is a part of every Georgian meal. Seeing the ‘tone’ and how typically Georgian it was as a setting, I joked that we should shoot inside it. But Omo didn’t get that I was being facetious, and before I could stop him he’d walked inside and asked the baker if I could take some pictures there. The owner barked in a level of Georgian that I could just about understand that he would allow it, but it was “very hot” and so I had to be “very quick”. So I did as instructed, but I was too bashful to bring Omo in on the scene.