When the Olympic torch reaches Sochi, Russia, to begin the Winter Games two months from now, it will have traveled farther than any other torch in Winter Olympics history. Since its odyssey began in Moscow, the torch has been carried by foot, on trains, planes and troikas, taken to the North Pole via icebreaker and into lower Earth orbit on a Soyuz rocket.

The Olympics are built on boasts, and Sochi 2014 is no exception. Though plagued by corruption and other controversies — insufficiently cold weather, uncertainty about the presence of antidoping agencies, power failures, Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda” — they are the most lavish and costliest Olympics, approached as though the International Olympic Committee was expecting titans to clash in its stadiums.

But the photographer Mikhail Mordasov wasn’t interested in the superlatives or the hype: he wanted to cut through all the commotion coming out of the Black Sea resort area and reveal the landscape, the city and its people.

“I wanted to show the city to the people who have never been here or just seen the beach as it is truly like,” Mr. Mordasov, 31, said via email.

It is a beautiful land — not merely a vacation spot near Georgia or another of Stalin’s dachas. It is the site of fishing, funerals, baths, balloons, weddings and work. It is changing, yes, but it still bears some marks of the Soviet era (Slides 5 and 11). It is increasingly a multicultural city, as the number of migrants swells as they arrive to finish the job of completing the two Olympic villages and the arenas in which the world’s elite athletes will compete.

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Mr. Mordasov, originally from Velikiy Novgorod, Russia, arrived in Sochi four years ago on assignment from RIA Novosti, the state news agency. It was his first time visiting the city, but he was smitten and stayed even after he left RIA Novosti to pursue freelance work. Over time, his opinion of Sochi as the site of the next Olympic contests grew complicated.

He welcomes some of the changes that the intense and swift development has brought: new transportation infrastructure, including high-speed rail, new roads and a power plant. The work has hastened the modernization of Sochi, shedding a lot of its Soviet structures and the stigma of its noxious Stalinist legacy. “Talking about the Olympics,” Mr. Mordasov said, “I’m happy about it as it brought me a job and I moved to Sochi to live.” Young professionals have flocked there, opening businesses, creating jobs.

But he also frets about the rising prices that follow when so many people move to the area. And he is concerned that the construction has adversely affected the environment and air, and that it will take years to recover.

After all, Sochi’s proximity to nature was one of the things that attracted him to the area. The mild climate, “the fact that half of year I can wear slippers and light clothing,” the closeness of the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains and the Tissot-Box Grove forest are among Sochi’s inestimable treasures. Mr. Mordasov points to his image of (Slide 7) of Tissot-Box Grove as essential to his appreciation of Sochi, something no one would think to advertise as representing his beloved city.

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“In this forest you can feel yourself as if you were in prehistoric years,” he said. “The contrast with the modern city, with loads of people and constructions, is unbelievable. If you Google ‘Sochi pictures,’ you’d never find such a great image of the city, but it is a reality which is quite close to us.”

But, more painfully, there is the story of those who happened to live in the path of Sochi’s development. As the city is thrust onto the international stage by those in search of glory and profit, the normal people — some 2,000 of them — have been brushed aside.

Mr. Mordasov’s photo of Alexei Kravets (Slide 9) was perhaps the most emotionally difficult to take. He said that Mr. Kravets and his 13-year-old son were forcibly evicted from their home by officials, their possessions tossed onto the street on a rainy day.

Mr. Kravets was not given temporary housing by the government, as some displaced persons have been. As Mr. Mordasov heard more of Mr. Kravets’s story, ambivalence about what the Olympics have brought to Sochi crept in. That included an ambivalence about his own work as a photographer who could choose his subject but not help him. “He had a hope that I could help him to get the compensation he needed,” Mr. Mordasov said of Mr. Kravets, “but unfortunately it was not under my control.”

“I had to explain him every day why I cannot do it for him,” he said, “and that I am only able to show and tell his story to the world, but not to influence the government. At the end of the day, his house was ruined and there is picture of me left in his eyes as someone who was taking photos, but never went further with helping.”

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