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I was studying the piano in musical school and I dropped it because I was
really amazed by photography
and I started to spend more time in the photography studio than in the musical school classes
The fact that I was somehow educated in this field and was also a
spectator during these concerts when I was working as an assistant administrator at
this big concert hall for classical music at St Petersburg
played an essential role dominating the way I was considering photography
so its something that helped me to build actually this body of work, the series
City of Shadows was the music of Shostakovich.
In City of Shadows, this music helped me not only to find the way
to build this many pictures as an ensemble, but find a real subject matter to photograph.
For example, the Cello Concerto #2, the music is so narrative
you actually see images there. The images I saw helped by what I knew about Shostakovich's life
pushed me to go to certain places, take certain images…
The introduction, the beginning of the second Cello Concerto - it is music with
long exposure somehow. If you'd start to listen to it, its so long and so slow and
it showed the state of despair that is becoming
somehow more playful at the end, and its similar to the life itself.
This impulse came from understanding that there is something visually important
that translates in a visual way the situation, creating a metaphor of what happened with people.
The whole Nomenclature of Signs, it was a way to
describe by visual language what was happening
with the people in the Soviet Union, they were just
not human beings - they became "signs"
just something that you may just erase
from the same, unfortunately they go back
they became "shadows".
When that idea unconsciously came to my mind
it gave me an impulse to take images.
I never never never manage to prepare
anything before. The whole idea for me of art was that it'd have to
come from the feelings that I have as an artist from a particular moment
Its humid in St Petersburg, is cold during the winter. If there is a snow you
are are wet. The camera is becoming wet even though you may
go home to put it, every part of Hasselblad on the radiator and in 5 minutes
its ready to go again. I started to do images with the long exposure I never know what
When I started to do images with the long exposure, I'd never know what
would be the end of the long exposure because it can predict the future.
When you do long exposure, you actually put yourself in the exposure so when you just
with this camera - Leica, take a shot and go away, nobody pays attention to you but when you
have a huge camera with a tripod, you have to stay several minutes in one place. This is a big deal -
your presence actually changes the situation. The situation is becoming not
the same. So you're manipulating the situation and the image therefore it is not true.
I was doing the same, especially in Havana where people are very friendly and so
immediately you put the camera on the ground, they want to speak with you
so you have to really learn find out something so they don't go towards you
and you know say hello, etc etc etc. So I was using in Havana the same techniques so
I was pretending that I was doing something that is not photography or
even pretending that I'm selling my camera waiting for customers to come to buy
So this is the process called "silver reducer"
its not the bleaching
but at the same time eliminates the silver
bleaching is the second part of this first
having washed it
in a couple of hours I will start to
to bleach the lamps and this area
and then I put in the sepia toner
and then the print is done for today
and tomorrow I do selenium and gold (toning)
so I never do
the bleaching until the end
at one time
I put the print aside
so to analyze it - if you do
everything right now, I may over-bleach it
and bleaching is un-reversable
you can't go back
so you have to really take care of
every step when you are bleaching
so I prefer to put the print aside, wait a little bit
and look the second time
and see if I like it or not
if I don't like it the second time
if I feel the second time that it should be bleached more
then I do it
Sepia but on dry print
and this is sepia on wet print
exactly what I did there
When you look at this image there is something happening in the atmosphere
its the
start of the positive when the day is cloudy
there is some feeling - there are signs that
there will be sun again
in a few moments so you feel that on this image
because you know the clouds are
becoming less dense and some warmer light is coming
from the sun that is somewhere else and nothing is happening here
its completely cold
this kind of dynamic - the effect of surealism and
sort of wind, surealistic - it's good for certain type of series or a certain type of situation it's
amplifies the dramatic effect if I don't want to - for example when I take
pictures of New York I don't want to be dramatic because I don't think
that the situation in New York now is as dramatic as it was in St. Petersburg when
everything
was similar to the war and people were dying of hunger
You start to do something real, it always
comes little by little so only people who never did anything in art think that
you may (snaps) do like that and make interesting work.
the work that lasts for ever - they are never done like that
its a long and complicated process - its one step forward, two steps back or
two steps forward one step back - and it comes along with something
that helps
you to find the way to build this body of work