Kirill Oreshkin, from Moscow, is a photographer with a strange passion. He’s crazy about ‘rooftopping’ – a sport that involves hanging on for his dear life from all kinds of precarious ledges.
In all the photographs, you can see him smiling nonchalantly at the camera. Going by his expression, you’d think he was hanging around the corner of a sidewalk. But he’s actually perched hundreds of meters above the ground, in an extremely precarious position. One wrong move and there’s no escaping death.
26-year-old Mustang Wanted (not his real name, obviously) got the nickname “real-life Spider-Man” after he spent the last decade climbing atop some of the highest structures in the former USSR, and taking unbelievable photos of himself dangling on one hand or tiptoeing on metal rails.
Ever since he was just a child, Mustang Wanted had a taste for extreme sports, and among his first hobbies were practicing the Brazilian art of Capoeira and “throwing battle axes”. Now, the former legal adviser from Kiev satisfies his adrenaline cravings by scaling sky-high structures, performing unbelievable stunts and sharing photos and videos of his achievements through social media. Some of his most famous exploits include doing push-ups on a metal tower at about 300 feet above ground, and dangling by one hand from a metal crane 150 meters up in the air. Just watching this stuff is enough to make most people’s hands sweat, but the young daredevil says for him fear does not exist: “Sometimes I think that I’m a robot. I do not feel anything.” His only real concern is getting caught by the police, who have on occasions disrupted his plans. Death is certainly not his biggest worry while balancing on metal beams and offering his fans a bird’s eye view of urban Ukraine and Russia, and even says he would rather die than suffer an injury that would end his “skywalking” career.
Skywalking is the latest photography craze among Russian teens. The idea is to be able to find a really high building, climb to the very top and stand at its very edge, imagining you’re on the top of the world. Then, you take photographs from up there to post on the internet. The teens participating in this form of skywalking do so without any sort of safety equipment. Needless to say, they enjoy it very much.
19-year-old Marat Dupri is one such teenager who engages in skywalking. He risks his life quite casually, scaling sky-high buildings and capturing photographs of the world below. It was about 18 months ago that he purchased a camera and started to take pictures from his own roof. But soon, he was aiming for bigger and better ones. Accompanied by a friend, he scaled a 33-storey building to the very top going right to the very edge of the 120 m high structure. According to him, “It was such a thrill; we couldn’t wait to do it again.” And they didn’t. One of the shots shows the group of teenagers scaling one of Russia’s seven Soviet skyscrapers, using a ladder. In another one, his friend is perched at the side of a monument to Peter I, 215 m in the air. There are even photos from atop the Moscow tower, one of the highest buildings in Europe. Dupri and his friends say they’ve taken a lot of photos by sneaking past guards and getting access to structures illegally. He thinks the risks are definitely worth it to take such amazing pictures. “When I am on the roof I have a feeling that the whole world is at my feet. All my problems and troubles are left somewhere down. The height exilarates me. I am enjoying with my home town views. It gives me energy and fills with enthusiasm to make new and great shots,” he says.
