Looking Backwards, Facing West: St. Petersburg Photography Today
In the papers, on the news and in the international spotlight, Russia today is a force to be reckoned with. As always, though Moscow is the epicenter of the political power, St. Petersburg is the heart of Russian cultural production. In the visual arts, particularly in photography, St Petersburg is represented by both acknowledged and budding masters. Here, photography has almost driven out painting by taking over its representative and narrative functions. Moreover, almost all great masters on the art stage either begin with photography or integrate it into their works.
The St. Petersburg School of Photography brought together artists who were united in their devotion to black-and-white graphic design in photography. This notwithstanding, the school has since branched into several independent genres. One aims to capture a genuine moment that embodies a deeper symbolic statement about the surrounding world. The recognized masters of this type of photography include Boris Mikhalevkin, Vladimir Nikitin, and Stas Chabutkin. The conceptual approach to the photo-image is best represented by Andrei Chezhin. Alexander Kitaev is the established standard of cityscape photography. Photo-portraiture is being developed by Olga Korsunova and Eugene Mokhorev. The works of Petersburg artists reveal a noticeable tendency towards contour blurring, inaccuracy and decentering, experimenting with image-overlapping and distortion. As a result of these practices, their pictures seem to be protected by a veil that turns the subject into a withdrawn image. Photography has ceased to appeal to the withered philistine heart, it does not profess new ideas any longer.
Lissitzky’s collages or Rodchenko’s political photographs are looked at as stylish works today. Images created by contemporary photographers are self-contained, immune from the necessity to convey a social/artistic/moral message. Most of the images are haunted by a prevailing, vaguely Petersburgian mood, rather than driven by a clear-cut statement; pictures of even the poorest neighborhoods and alleys in town are not a social plea demanding immediate action, but rather an impressionistic print of a surface. In this formalist manner, a filthy roughcast wall in an archway is equivalent to the dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral. The texture of the wall interests a photographer only as a surface of whose cast he takes a picture.
The time of manifestos and visualization theories is gone. Contemporary Petersburg photography is a dream-reserve under the town’s spell.
Photographers are renouncing proclamations and appeals, they feel free from romantic aspirations of capturing the identity of an occurrence or a person. That is why, with the younger generation of Petersburg artists, portraiture is undergoing a visible transformation. While the previous generation sought to reflect the peculiarity of personality or the nature of the epoch, emerging photographers seem to perceive a human face as a certain surface. Individuality gives way to fixation on appearances, the characters being club folks, as is the case in Oleg Shagapov’s works or odalisques as in Asya Nemchenok’s pieces.
Another characteristic of New Petersburg Photography is its deliberate gaze at the past, rather than toward the future. Deliberate appropriation of the old means and infelicities?retouching, painting over black-and-white photographs, conscious and skillful scratching, out-of-focus images, ragged edges, faded photographs. Photographers seek out old films and use developing paper to recreate the effects of past modes. Thus, the method turns into style and develops into a concept.
Interest in the past and simulation of its infelicities constitute two sides of one process. This does not mean that the past is regarded as a mistake or that a mistake lies in the past. For instance, when Sergey Shcherbakov stylizes his works to look like snapshots taken by a schoolboy armed with a Shkolnik camera, he plays a post-modernist game with the outdated technologies and appropriates them for his unique style.
The distinguishing features of the history of world photography as compared with the Petersburg photography lie, first and foremost, in differences of access and of available opportunity. While international photography has received the notice of photo biennials and has been integrated into museums and gallery institutions, Petersburg’s photographs got no further than dusty Soviet cultural centers. These works were made in the bathrooms of communal apartments that were sporadically transformed into home-grown studios. Petersburg post-modernism is retro game with the history that befell Russian art on the whole. It is the return to our artistic past.
The effect of these rippled (historical) surfaces, blurred outlines, and skillfully elaborated flaws is prominent not only in the technique of making photographs. It is reiterated on the level of understanding what photography is today. Now it is generally acknowledged that photography’s artistic value is equal to that of other fine arts. A photograph printed by hand is akin to a graphic work. Having established itself as a full-fledged, independent art form, it presumes to pass for non-photography, that is, for painting (as with A. Nemchenok’s pieces), a graphic art (see works by Nadezhda Kuznetsova, who is enchanted with black-and-white graphic Petersburg), or even a performance (as is the case with Provorotov or Panteleev’s creations). Contemporary photography blurs the conventional boundaries that define techniques, genres and mediums. A photograph may be used as the ground for a canvas, part of an installation, a frame in a video-work. The peculiarity of Petersburg’s younger generation of photographers is that they do not transmute photographs into material for any other art, but they accommodate other arts into the photo-image. Their mastery lies in the freedom of this synthesis.
In response to the pretense that photography must reflect reality as it is, contemporary Petersburg photography returns to photography?s genuine origin: when as a scientific tool, it explored the chemistry of light action rather than seeking a fixated social reality. Like any representation that is subject to foreseeing, fore-understanding and fore-interpretation, the pretense was wrong from the outset and today photography destroys this shibboleth, the belief in the actuality of the photo-image. The only given is that time-and-space exist in print, through light action, the visual evidence of its materialness.
Commercial photography is increasingly employing new techniques to create images- digital cameras, computer programs, etc. Photography in the digital world is becoming just another medium available for an art-designer, a photograph ceasing to be a single work of art. The simplicity and availability of obtaining a color image shifts the interest from the fixation of reality to the interpretation of reality, during the subsequent computer treatment of this model of reality. Since the techniques of digital treatment of the image became accessible to the public at large, the dividing line between the work of an artist and that of a common commercial designer has become blurred. Designers use the same programs and achieve the same effects, but their aims are different: they produce commercial goods while artists work for the sake of art. As a result, many artists willing to estimate the role of technology in creating a work of art took a deliberate and firm stand against the proliferation of computer technologies that keep refining the quality of image. In contempt of the world of commerce that seeks a more aesthetically perfect image, they use the simplest techniques, perform the elementary functions, such as slide shows.
The trash-art movements gather momentum, as it popularizes a low-tech approach to art and focuses all its energy to castigating the hi-tech-oriented society. Withstanding the impact of advert-images, artists claim that the pillar of contemporary art is no longer the bourgeois standard of beauty that has become an efficient means to spur the growth of sales, but the capacity to treat the surrounding consumer society critically and sensibly. Among Petersburg?s artists, D. Shubin was the one who devoted his projects to this topic: in a work entitled Trash-TV, he invited young artists who employ primitive technologies to take part in this alternative to television that employs state-of-the-art technological achievements to create an illusion of public prosperity and unity.
At the same time, artists can use trash methods to criticize cheap advertising and design products that flood the visual environment. This is the feel of Couch-Potato Shopping, a photo- and video project by Anna Kolosova, in which she mocks the aesthetics of couch-potato shopping through television shows and advertisements placed in cheap informational editions. Here Russian artists and cultural workers made up texts on the spot, texts that advertised an object of contemporary art which had been concocted from improvised means in half no time. Kolosova argues that in our world, where advertising reigns supreme, everything has fallen victim to its thrust, including contemporary art, which frequently is no less trashy than products of mass consumption. Why, then, don’t Russian artists advertise contemporary art in the same way as artists promote slimming tablets?
The notion of project becomes significant for understanding the current situation in Russian art. It forms a substitution for action and performance. Contemporary artists make projects for which they invite not only their fellow-artists but also common people. Such art projects acquire certain features of a sociological study. This route has been largely explored by Dmitry Vilensky with the FFA Group (The Factory of Found Apparel). Other projects explore informational space, first and foremost, the Internet as the most democratic and accessible way of addressing large audiences. Artists set up their own websites not only as a means of self-promotion but also as a means to exercise their creativity. Andrei Velikanov, for one, designs and carries out net-projects.
Those who work on traditional genres painting, graphic art, classic photography are moving toward motion-pictures, employing technology to create flash images. Works by a young Petersburg artist, Vitaly Pushnovsky, are a good example of a successful usage of flash systems. His flash-video, The Sky showed that the minimalism of technological opportunities may serve as a stepping stone to creating an original work. Photoshop and Slideshow software tools are sufficient to fulfill a profound art conception.
Thus, Petersburg photography gradually flows into the mainstream of international art, while reserving the right of geographical self-identification.
