Art Photography of Today's St. Petersburg - A Collection of Images
The history of photography maps St. Petersburg as a locus memo-rium for it was the site of the first lecture given in the Russian Empire on the French discovery of "drawing from life using light". Moscow, in its turn, led in practical applications of photography.
Saint Petersburg epitomizes statehood and power, power of history over the present among other things. In the 19th-century photography, the city is associated with the ceremonial cityscapes and accounts vividly demonstrating the 19th-century notions of the sights "worthy of being preserved for history". Early in the 20th century St. Petersburg added to its reputation the status of the prime center of photographic portrait which dictated its representation style to the outlying provinces. That style seemed to filter through, not unlike fashion, when a provincial governor affected the same style in clothes as the Emperor and any pretty prospective bride tried to emulate the Empress. In 1918, when the status of the capital was returned to Moscow, the straitlaced "canonicity" and "ceremoniousness" of St. Petersburg's photography became somewhat more relaxed while the rich cultural heritage helped promote the development of informal, unofficial and experimental photography.
The splendid school of pictorial photography, which existed in St. Petersburg in the 1910s-1920s and which was rooted in the graphic works of the World of Art masters and in the superb collections of graphic works held by St. Petersburg's museums, today is known only to a select group of specialists. Unfortunately, this indigenous tradition has had no direct influence on the development of the new art photography school. It is therefore all the more surprising to find the affinity between the great-grandfathers and the great-grandsons who have no idea about their own roots.
It would a platitude to say that today's art photography of St. Petersburg has sprung from photo clubs of the 1970s. This happens to be true. What is also true is the influence on art photographers, belonging to the artistic underground, of some international artistic contacts of the 1970s - 1980s (also nearly clandestine) and of the very atmosphere of the museum-city. "It was first taken to a museum at five" is a catch phrase in interviews of St. Petersburg photographers belonging to most diverse artistic trends. Such a phrase may hardly crop up in interviews of their peers from other cities.
The history of contemporary art photography of St. Petersburg is as yet to be written by some meticulous researcher. For the time being, we know the main characters of the photo art scene. They themselves and their works have come to be coated in so many myths that students majoring in art criticism in 2010 will have to take their time to puzzle them out.
Myths and Legends of St. Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is rife with myths and legends. It's Venice, Holland and the city of a Thousand White Nights and One White Night rolled into one. Ten years ago the "Mythology of Saint Petersburg" and "Metaphysics of Saint Petersburg" were read by passengers in the Underground like these were the books written by Borghes. Just imagine the "Metaphysics of Moscow" in the hands of some cultured-looking girl and you'd think she is a culture vulture taking some highbrow optional course at an university. In contrast, to read something of this kind about St. Petersburg is trendy rather than freaky, it's more like going down with a group of cave explorers to the foundations of the Moscow cathedrals. Meanwhile, inhabitants of St. Petersburg prefer to explore the city roofs.
Even today the spirit of the 1980s haunts the saintly city. You can sense it in the yards and in the streets neglected between the holidays as soon as you turned off the Nevsky Prospect. More to it, around Sennaya Square you can plunge night into the times of Dostoevsky. The homeless here may wear Turkish leather jackets, and a row of old women may sell empty bottles but, all the same, the subjects of conversations revolve around the fates of the world and the spiral of history. Here, one is reminded of a fairy tale for kids. It is about aliens who planned to seize the Earth should its inhabitants prove to be weak in spirit. A scout was sent out to meet with a shepherd and with the richest man. Having sadly miscalculated, the scout met with the shepherd first. After a talk with modern-day Socrates who tended to his herd, both the scout and his troops went away. In St. Petersburg to engage in such talks people used to go to beer-houses. The tradition still keeps but some of the old patrons can nowadays be found at the same addresses but already in coffee-houses - time changed. Yet, changes notwithstanding, the walls of houses, museums, and domed palace courts, where one can lavishly, Russian-style partake of some smorgasbord for a pittance, continue to store the energy of creativity.
New back to St. Petersburg's mythology. It goes without saying that the city is virtually crammed with myths and mythological characters. And yet, the literary tradition of Peter's (inhabitants of St. Petersburg name their city Peter) mythography is one thing and its visual representation is quite another. As long as photography in Russia was out of fashion, St. Petersburg's visual imagery was in the realm of graphic art and painting but nowadays photography is "in". Let/s discuss what this entails.
Myths
I. Mythos of Topos
Aleksandr Kitaev is one of St. Petersburg's photography myths. What he used to be (and he used to be an operations photographer at a shiphnilding works) and who head about him in the 1980s is immaterial. What counts is that he has worked much and fruitfully. Having once looked at his cityscapes taken with a Leica wide-angle lens, one can't help recollecting them whenever one looks at rows of old market stalls or at intersections of canals.
For many of his peers in St. Petersburg Kitaev stands for mastery in direct and experimental printing. Printing means everything for direct narrow-film photography with a reporter's Leica. It was not for nothing that Mr. Cartier-Bresson confessed that he had never printed himself for "the printing of photos is an entirely different profession". That, surely, confused photographers among the Russian readers of his interview. Kitaev, in his turn, managed to combine the daily practice of photography (mind his photo diary 365 photos of the year 19..) with the nightly practice of printing. The result is of museum quality. Beside printing itself, and it should be noted in parenthesis that Kitaev shares his love for the materials well past the expiry date with many of other Peter's photo artists, that adding some unexpected softness and special tonality to his works, he also resorts to color toning.
Color toning is truly wondrous. Especially high praise was sung to this magic process in the lectures given at photo clubs in the 1970s. You take an overexposed print, put it into one solution, then rinse it in another, and here is a wonderful blue (brown, red) work. The color adds associative vividness while flaws of printing and even banality of the subject-matter cease to mean anything when what you get is a fresh look at the world through the color glasses. Naturally enough, new digital technologies detracted somewhat from this love for chemical experiments. Yet, Kitaev's yellow cityscapes of the St. Petersburg, like meanings and new intensity. How can one escape from the madness of yellow mists? Where can one hide from the rusty reflections of the bridges in the synonyms of the artificial, which designates the very nature of Peter's urbanism. Kitaev thus has proved to be sincere in that he recognizes his own yellow insanity and that, like all natives, he has yellow cells of madness in his own blood.
II. Mythological Characters
Today, Andrey Chezhin is one of the champions in the league. His one-man shows abroad in various museums and photography institutions run into scores. From the very beginning of his career, Chezhin already felt his kinship with the great photographers of St. Petersburg.
Karl Bulla features among the most famous mythological characters of St. Petersburg. This foreign subject who started his own business, which gradually turned into a veritable photographic empire, was, for some reasons, a darling of those Soviet art critics who dabbled at reviewing photo art. That is the reason why that prominent paparazzi of his time and progenitor of a photographic dynasty (his sons Victor and Aleksandr followed him, with Victor becoming an icon of Russia's photo reporting in the 1900s-1930s) who managed to leave Russia before WWI is still called "the king of reporting" and "father of Russian reportage photography".
Bulla's archive comprising dens of thousands of negatives that have survived out of the initial hundreds of thousands is striking in its diversity as compared to those of some later masters. Its scope is comparable only to the archives of his contemporaries which amount to several score of thousands in Atget repository in Paris, tens of thousands in the surviving past of Maxim Dmitriev's archive, and mere hundreds in the nearly extinct archives of some provincial masters.
Early in the 1990s Andrey Chezhin created a series entitled Visiting Bulla what he did was to insert his self-portraits into the interiors of Bulla's photos: Chezhin visiting Bulla at the photosession in a swimming-pool, Chezhin visiting Bulla in the mess of a workhouse, The portrait of Chezhin on the wall of an orphanage, etc. The "mityok" tradition of jocular texts going with the neolubok pictures in the old style of cheap popular prints - is turned by Chezhin into a photographic game. This game becomes possible due to the illusion, destroyed in the 20th century, that photography is objective and historically authentic. The rules of the game involve the present-day viewer's mistrust and, at the same time, curiosity concerning collage, retouching and double exposure. One could see how readily the Western viewer, untouched by the bug of the Soviet ideology, joined the game of debunking "the historical authenticity" of Visiting Bulla, seeing its purpose in the absence of the "inside-the-plot key" to question at Chezhin's whereabouts rather than in the artist's masterly stylization of his self-portraits.
Legends
Unlike the city itself, which has attained the stature of a grandiose myth, most cultural figures of St. Petersburg remain no more than mere cultural legends, footnotes and captions, which may extend the cultural context but fall short of adding a new dimension.
III.Dostoevsky; views of St. Petersburg fogs and dampness
Aleksey Titarenko is one of the few Russian artists who enjoy international fame, which neither the artist himself nor his agents deny, when they are back home. This appears to be intellectually correct and shows a civilized attitude to one's own popularity. Besides, this artist is characterized by marked attention to the quality of prints. His prints, however, are entirely different from those produced by Kitaev. Titarenko's photography involved wet printing, which creates an illusion of total and complete development of detail, "rivers" conveying the movement of the human masses, and of damp fuzziness of contours. Earth of his works features some kind of Dostoevskian devilry, when a rational and seemingly cold human spacies turns out to be eaten away by self-questioning and tortured by historical allusions; when one is given to abrupt standstills after a frenzy of movement as it on cue; and when one is full of conflicting urges (signifying that one is alive) and, at the same time, senses the deathly hopelessness of life suggested by water.
IV. The Silver City
Gold may vary in purity. In color, it may be black or yellow, or, sometimes, white, as if flirting with silver.
Silver, if pure, remains the same in color, but only until it comes to be used in the photographic process. Subjected to the physical impact and biological substances, silver acquires a gamut of color possibilities. It may become blue, or red, or violet or even pale lemon yellow. All this is the matter of toning. Now back to chezhin, who enhances the process of multicolored transformations of the noble photographic metal through multiple exposure. The image becomes decomposed into its formed constituents. Imprinted on the film equally sharply, in the sites of superimposition these components ac-quire some new density, which, at toning, begins to resemble a heated colored nucleus of a comet with the toned tail thinning out to white. This series of color transformations of silver in the print is dedi-cated to St. Petersburg of the year 2000, the city showing patina and crackle, and still free from any later traces of cosmetic restoration.
V. Legends of Light. For Aleksandr Kitaev photograms
St. Petersburg goes for photograms. Adherents of this art of photography without a camera, for it takes nothing but a source of light, an object itself, a light-sensitive carrier and photographic chemistry, can be found in Moscow too, yet the difference is that in St. Petersburg they contemplate spaces rather than a shadow plane and its carrier. One photography philosopher, when explaining the differences between the photographic schools, remarked that "reporters and everybody who cares for sharpness, explore surfaces, and there is no place for spirit there; spirit lives in space, which is the domain of "pictorialist's". Photogramers also deal with light space. The problem is whether there is any spirit residing among "inanimate" objects, for the greater share of the art of photogram is, in fact, the art of still-lifes or still-lights, if you please. It should be noted, however, that objects comprising a still-life for a photogram cease to be recognizable, and in the their photographic play-acting they become substitutes for other objects, what, not infrequently, are animate or corporeal (meaning sexual corporality). The objects in a still-life thus acquire new meanings like legendary characters who pass from the dimension of reality into the mythogenic dimension.
VI. Digital Legends
Beside some impersonal legends centering on photography itself, St. Petersburg is inhabited by certain legendary figures. There are, for example, some hazy legends of the marginal areas, located, in a virtual manner, on the borderline of experimental artistic endeavor and traditional photography, new media and old recognizable images. A host of legendary characters of this gray area went unsung. Let the mighty ones survived, some ladies among them. Olga Tobreluts is the member-one lady in this no-man's land (no pun is intended). The Russian Museum is prepared to recognize this unexplored realm as the territory of art but is somewhat embarrassed by the fact that it features in monographs on modern photography. This embarrassment is quelled only by the author's double share of fame, because she is known both as an artist and as a photographer. Tobreluts picks images from old photographs and well-known canvases, turns them into 3D computer representations and colors them. Although not every viewer can discern the intricacies of computer development of an idea (after all, this is what cri-tics are for), the overwhelming majority of the culturally spoilt public will really enjoy looking at those colored digital neoluboks.
The Heroes of Our Times
The heroes of our times are the heroes of our times is the title of famous Russian romantic book of early 19th century. You cannot call them the heroes of present-day art photography. Otherwise, the trend's proponents would be confined to today's top-list of the mainstream, all the rest easily disposed of. A year later, the representatives of the "non-topical" trends would find themselves on the crest of unpredictable success without any effort on their part. The one thing needed for such success would be some characteristic personal touch or, put differently, some specific part in the role play.
VII. The Developer
Andrey Chezhin has been nominated the hero of St. Petersburg's present-day thrice. Several years ago one would doubt that the mighty of the earth (meaning gallery keepers and curators) could pay heed to an artist producing ten projects annually. They would argue that great industry and boundless imagination are no testimony to one's genius. Well, life is stranger than fiction. Nowadays Chezhin is much sought-after. As to an endless train of new projects, these go together with some old themes, recurring through the years and becoming the artist's trademark. For Chezhin, one such theme is that of a drawing pin, a me-taphor for man as a cog in the Soviet/post-Soviet system. In Che-zhin's artistic effort, a drawing pin first replaced an average citizen in a photo album of some X family, then extended to portraits of the drawing pin's relations, and, finally, triumphed as a substitute for humankind. As some textbook on the history of art (written on the ocassion of some Party Congress or other) has it, art is about man, even the 20th -century art. In the compositions dedicated to the great artists of the past century, such as the Hommage `a Lisitsky, Hommage `a Dalí, Hommage `a Picasso, etc. Chezhin offers a make-believe situation suggesting that the great masters could have chosen a drawing pin to be the main character of their works on account of it being "the eternal subject of art".
VIII. The Researcher
For many years Yevgenyi Mokhorev was the youngest figure among the heroes of St. Petersburg's photographic Olympus. Nowadays, there are others who are younger still, but he remains the crowd's infant terrible. Partly this is because his works, be they contrived or reportage-like, and regardless of whether they are showing interiors or are urbanistic, are the portraits of teenagers or relates to their lives. At a cursory glance at Mokhorev's works, one may accuse him of anything. And yet, who else has managed to show the world of a person who is stepping into the waters of self-identification but is still aware that these are the waters of an ocean? He makes his characters view the lens of a camera as a mirror and attains the "time come to a standstill" effect comparable to that of looking at one's own self. This fascinates the viewer, making him/her self-aware. The viewer is both frightened and attracted by the classical purity of sculptural jestures and fixedness.
IX. The Interpreter — gregory maiofis is a gra-phic artist in the second generation. Were it not for photography it would be difficult to imagine a career for him other than studies at the Art Academy and the subsequent exhibitions in museums. But photography changes the habitual scenarios of artistic life. So the artists, whose father made himself famous with subtle metaphoric illustrations executed in the minimalist manner, competes with the older generation in the filed of polysemanticism using such photographic means as various arrangements, wide-frame photography and printing by hand. That he hand-paints the most meaningful elements of his works is the last reminder of the artist's earlier rich experience in painting. He may use water-color, oil, ink or pencil but his art is based on photography. Maiofis, Jr. is one of the few Russian artists who are good at visual form. According to the artist himself, his choice of elements for compositions is "far from random", and thus visual form as such provokes a great intellectual game. What he has found in photography is an ability to impart some dangerous texturality, "metareality of the presence" of objects constituting the semantic content of collages.
X. The Mocker
Dmitry Shubin is another artist who has attained success in photography. The Extra Body, his most fa-mous project, is a tribute to an infatuation of the European art-related community with sociological research in art. Cinema, photography, video, and - perish the thought - literature of the 1990s abound in parascientific projects. These are so many that they smack of
a déja vu. The researcher's synopsis/femininity and the addiction to rock/pain/rebellion, as a rule, presedes and shrouds the study and the recording in order to facilitate understanding of an image for the viewer. As a result, it becomes impossible to discriminate between play-acting/manipulation and the reality. Shubin' mocks at this 'so-ciological artreality" by introducing the icons of rebellious European feminism (works by Cindy Sherman and others) into portraits of St. Petersburg's young girls, and by making the viewer play a game with the well-known rules: believe in the existence of some inherent relationship and find it among the real and symbolic objects; build your own text ignoring the element of play-acting / stage-managed un-naturalness of the depicted. Many like this game.
XI. The Teacher
Igor Lebedev is a photographer and he is known as such. In St. Petersburg, however, he is more known as a teacher who works with children using the means of photography. Whether he teaches photography to children or teaches them to think and to adapt to adulthood is a moot point. Although the process of immersion in photography is inversely proportional to a life success in the capitalistic sense, this very process promotes one's mental and creative development in all respects and teaches one to early formulate searching questions on the meaning of life. Children are not sent to study under Lebedev's guidance against their will, they come themselves, so that they get their early "deviant" development through their own consent. Meanwhile, they get prizes and accumulate points of their coming fame for their trenage angular shots. Lebedev can see a promise of a new Sarah Moon or Cartier-Bresson in a child of an early age, and he never stops being amazed at how a gift for photography may become manifest and then vanish, leaving a pimply teenager in the category of luckless for several years, all the while that gift working for the young soul in advance of a powerful creative breakthrough. When Lebedev speaks about his pupils he evokes probably, like Faraday on the verge of discovering the laws of electricity. The latter was trying to bring some order into the tangle of most diverse manifestations and then, suddenly, he saw the whole picture. As to Lebedev's own work, he draws inspiration from cinema and old wartime photos, trying to bring together various threads connecting visual space.
XII. The Storyteller
Aleksandr Chernogrivov is still considered to belong to the younger generation. A sturdy young man with a sullen look and outward resemblance to teenagers who spend hours on playing computer games, he is pro-bably the last representative of non-computer photography. Yet he acts within this field with as much as that of his peers who play out virtual battles. He develops new techniques and uses the old ones, and, among them, even those which the photo groups students are told never to use because they are finished and dispensed with for the lack of any potential.
As a photo artist Chernogrivov works serially, and seriality of his thinking finds its expression as variations within the bounds of the series subject, these variations being equally unexpected and equally successful. This artist is capable of "jazz improvisations" without losing novelty, rhythm and pace in his visual experimentation. In the past four years the range of the subjects he covered ran from fairy tales, dreams and playing with tin toy soldiers to frightening blot-like birds and nudes. To enhance expressiveness he had to extend the technical and emotional range from painstaking collages to expressive chemiography /monotypes (prints of objects and bodies on photographic paper).
XIII. The Chemist-Artist
Nadezhda Kouznetsova is a graphic artist who paints on photographic paper with
a brush in the course the laboratory process. The photographic process taxonomists in St. Petersburg (by Valery Savchuk, the phi-losopher, in the first place) believe that her work exemplifies pre-analog photography: like photograms. Kouznetsova's works involve some light-sensitive carrier, i.e. chemistry, but light is substituted by an artist with a brush. Man's creative principle replaces natural (or divine) principle, thus giving rise to a photo-performance, the result of which baffles the viewer became of its resemblance to habitual photography. Firstly, this resemblance is based on similarity of "photographic paper to the surface of a black-and-white print" in texture, structure and color. Secondly, the resemblance is based on the artist's individual manner: she works with photochemistry as with water-color, using the wet technique and a la primo; her brush produces city-scapes that are equally like Chinese calligraphic drawings, Italian mountain-scapes, and black-and-white photographic images executed in the traditions of classical landscape photography with a touch of pictorial generalization.
XIV. The Trespasser
Despite the classicist tendencies predominating in modern-day photography of St. Petersburg, the city of black-and-white printing and manipulations with film/chemist-ry/paper, the city permeated with historical reminiscences, there is also room for photographers who exist in the context of European visual feminism, with symbol prevailing over image and subject-induced shock prevailing over common sense. Anna Timofe-yeva is a young curator and photographer. One of her latest projects, The Bloody Mary, deals with the feeling aroused be the sight of blood, vision and awareness being equated. Medical and physiological associations, which come to the forefront in this project are the end in themselves. This end has been achieved and successfully represented within the frameworks of international projects.
At first glance, the ranks of mythological and legendary figures of St. Petersburg's photography seem countless, and the tradition appears continuous. Over the past decade, however, one would sin hardly find more than three new names which could be compared in importance to those artists who are conventionally lumped together as "the school of St. Petersburg". Photography of necessity moves adjustment to the state of being "ready for use". Within the framework of today's photography an art-product increasingly becomes a rare avis, considering that, commercially, it is useless. Its aesthetic value, so far unconfirmed by institutionalization in the museum or publishing practices, remains but a subject of some ephemeral studies undertaken by art critics. To date, art photography in St. Petersburg still exists. It exists despite… Throughout the whole of the Soviet pe-riod this "despite" was a sine qua non of the existence of art photo-graphy, and it ceased to matter only for less than a decade in the 1990s. It seems that now, early into the 21st century, the situation repeats itself, and we are coming back to the familiar and never quite forgotten atmosphere implying that art photography, is, again, un-necessary presence.
Irina Tchmyreva