Alexandr Glyadyelov




According to Alexandr Glyadyelov, "Only photography still makes possible frank speaking about life". Glyadyelov, a freelance photographer from Kiev, is a man of paradoxes. One of the paradoxes lies in the fact that precisely I am writing this text. Many a time I have tried to ask Sasha about the core of his work - "I am interested in the psychology of creation", - I would say to him and he was laughing and avoiding the answer. I would listen curiously to the interviews he was giving to others, and sometimes I was reading them myself. So what? There is no point in it. Moreover, frankly speaking, he tells the most interesting things when he is tipsy and has a chat with young women. And I even do not drink. His pictures should be viewed soberly. I do not want to try being objective, it is useless for me, I simply want to get it clear in my mind. Glyadyelov entered professional photography fifteen years ago, and since 1997 he has acted effectively with his photographs on exhibitions. "His first series The Spare, which was displayed in 1997 and devoted to homeless children, shocked Ukraine. It cannot be called an exa-ggeration, since the exhibition provoked a wave of charity programmes" (D. Desyaterik, the Den daily).

He has been continuing his work over The Spare until now, exploiting any possibility for it, and at present it is the most known of his pro-jects, counting one hundred and a half exhibition photographs.
"The first pictures of this project were taken eight years ago, and I cannot answer even myself, when I will say "It is the end!" One part of the photographs are spontaneous ones, another is a result of continuous search, and the rest is an outcome of long trustworthy relationships, when it is hard to understand what is more difficult - to stand closer or go away. In these photographs there are not children who live normal life, not to speak of happiness. There are no reasons here to speak of it. At present, like in July of 1996, when I started these photographs, no official can tell us precisely how many street children there are in Ukraine or Russia. There is no sense in asking them about the truth. Specialists can work with approximate numbers, but I cannot. When I look to the face of a child directly or through a viewfinder of "Leica" and receive his or her responding look, it is beyond the sphere of estimation, nor is it an issue of estimative statistics in general.
I am simply aware that the child exists. His or her life and destiny are thrown away into a cesspool and he or she is trying to survive on the road, which often leads nowhere. Documentary photography conveys the pain of such existence. And quite often this pain is the main or the only testimony of humanity, which he or she is seeking, which I am seeking, which we all are seeking in a fair hope that it has to be different". He has written the above words referring to one of his recent exhibitions. The work that was initiated as a story about the life of street children now includes the pictures from the facilities of children's psychiatry, foster homes, approved schools, hospitals, AIDS centres, police stations, prisons, re-education colonies and refugee camps in Caucasus.
Some started to receive him as an author of one theme (he laughs, of course) and international humanitarian organizations consider him a practical specialist and consultant as regards problems of the street children. And that is no laughing matter. In the year 2002 the Medecins Sans Frontieres invited Glyadyelov to carry out the evaluation of the status of children 's homelessness in the streets of Moscow. Four months' work resulted in an illustrated report, on the background of which in August 2003 Belgian MSF launched a project of social and medicine aid for the street children in Moscow.
What are you doing here? - Militiamen ask Glyadyelov and with pleasure and interest check him during his photographing. - I am taking photographs. - What photographs? - Documentary ones. - I do not understand!!! Actually, it is becoming ever less understandable not only to militiamen, and not only in Ukraine and Russia. The following words have been written recently in the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta by the critic Mikhail Sidlin: "Nowadays, Russia is losing its social photography. Reason is simple - this photography has no customers. And the photographers who deal with social problems, however strange it may sound, work for the western audiences. And, for instance, a project of the Kiev photographer Alexandr Glyadyelov, appalling with the intensity of its impact - the pictures of Russian tuberculosis zones - is interesting only for the human rights activists. And this is not only a problem of photography. It is a problem of the society as a whole". Looking at Sasha it occurs to me that the reason is not that simple, that it does not consist only in the absence of customers (which, actually, Sidlin explained straightaway). But reflecting this one cannot escape moral labyrinths, and then one is heading towards drowning in metaphysics.

One year after The Spare, Glyadyelov was completely absorbed in another long-term project. It is a story of HIV / AIDS epidemic among intravenous drug users of Ukraine. To tell the truth, it is ridiculous to see embarrassment on the faces of specialists (toxicologists, psychologists, doctors and sociologists) viewing these photographs for the first time on the exhibition: How one could gain such trust, be allowed to come so close and become invisible at the same time? The reactions of critics, who most often and habitually review the exhibitions of contemporary art, tend to be virtually controversial.
Sergey Vasilyev, the Stolichnyye Novosti daily (Kiev): "You are astonished by pictures by Alexandr Glyadyelov. And you are ready to suspect everybody of smooth-faced sympathy and tenderness towards those fallen. The photographer takes documents of the very mechanism of evil with shocking cold-heartedness. Beside those photographs one's soul and all moral experience are up in arms, but, irrespective of how hard it is to confess, one observes and remembers only those photographs".
Dmitryi Desyaterik, the daily Den (Kiev): "Glyadyelov is far away from any staging. What is he interested most of all is the tears invisible to the world, the drama of everydayness, hidden behind fully familiar cityscapes. If he shots homeless children, who fight for the packet of glue, the addicts in the notorious district "Palermo" of Odessa, or prisoners, who suffer from tuberculosis (project Without the Mask, realized in Kemerovo) - his works lack incriminating pathos, they do not set diagnoses, nor do they give judgements. There prevails quotidian intonation and black-and-white report. Situations and images are sometimes simply unbearable, though. Glyadyelov does not beat for sympathy and does not state a fact - in his works, first of all, is present strong artistic quality, which arouses sympathy much more than the most pathetic journalism. Glyadelov's personages, however, are more than prisoners. Without resounding, avoiding journalist statement, Glyadyelov conveys the melody of destinies consisting of quiet everyday victories and everyday infinite despair as well".
Recently, Sasha was talking in my presence (we were just discussing this article) with his friend, the Kiev philosopher Alexandr Zhadan:

Sanya, what do you think about my photography at present? Glyadyelov asked. - Late dying romanticism. - That is, you consider me a romanticist? - Yes, and I am one also. I speak of romanticism as part of humanism, you call it humanity, and pursue it all over the world; it is leaving this world at a rapid pace, though.
I bear witness - he is really pursuing his goal. Four years ago he was working over the book on people living with HIV / AIDS. After his encounter with Andrey, an actor dying of AIDS, and maybe the last time in his life reciting a poem, Glyadyelov sent from the night Internet café a letter that included the following words:" I am simply a photographer who touch the sacred in people's lives, I am not surprised by the ever-multiplying evil among them, but I marvel at the depth of humanity, which cannot destroy itself in the end. This is the very thing I am looking for".
And it occurs to me, what's the use of the psychology of creation here?

Georgiy Tolkot



Aleksandr Glyadyelov was born in Legnitz, Poland, in 1956, into the family of a Soviet Army officer. Since 1974, he has lived in Kiev. He studied optics at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, graduating in 1980. Having studied photography independently since the mid 1980's, he began working as a professional freelance photojournalist in 1989. Glyadyelov has traveled frequently throughout the former Soviet Union taking photographs in Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Kyrgyztan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and the United States. He covered the armed conflicts in Moldova (where he was wounded), Nagornij Karabakh, and Chechnya. Since 1996-1997, Glyadyelov has concentrated on long-term documentary photography projects: socially abused children in the Ukraine, and the HIV / AIDS epidemic among intravenous drug users in the Ukraine (the book “Here and Now” was published in 2000 in Kiev). In 2001, working with the humanitarian organization Medecins sans frontieres, Glyadyelov began the project "Without the Mask" about the Tuberculosis epidemic in the Russian prisons. He was awarded the Grand-Prix of Ukrpressphoto-97, Hasselblad Prize at the European Photography contest in Vevey (Switzerland) in 1998 and Mother-Jones 2001 Medal of Excellence (USA). His photography has been used by international organizations such as MSF, WHO, Norwegian Refugee Council, UNAIDS, and UNICEF.

Solo exhibitions 2004 Niepotrzebni. Narkomani. Wiezniowie, Stara Galeria ZPAF. Warsaw. 2003 Drugs, AIDS and Life, Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania. Man and Prison, Dim Mikoly Gallery, Kiev, Ukraine. Spare, Vilnius photogallery, Vilnius, Lithuania. 2002 The International Red Cross Museum, Geneve, Switzerland. 2001 Without the Motherland, Izvestiya newspaper's oval hall, Moscow Russia. In Search of a Lost Past, Expocenter of Ukraine" National exhibition complex, Kiev. Uzhgorod State University, Uzhgorod, Ukraine. Doroga, RA gallery, Kiev, Ukraine. United Nations, NYC, USA. UN representative office, Ukraine. Without the Mask, Kemerovo Museum of Fine Arts, Kemerovo, Russia.