Focus on Russia: Contemporary Russian photography in YET magazine
For the last month FotoDepartment has been collaborating with YET magazine making a series of publications that focus on the state of contemporary Russian photography. Here you will find a selection of already published articles and learn of those that are yet to come.
An article on the current state of photography institutions and authors’ strategies by FotoDepartament curator Nadya Sheremetova:
“he active generation of 20-30-years-old photographers happen to lack heritage from their forerunners and don’t seem to display any interest in establishing any ties and common ground. This happened because of their giant leap forward in the history of photography, in less than 10 years, young artists have managed to keep up with the world context of contemporary photography. Hence, this visual field as well as the field of ideas and senses appeared to be even more engaging than a visual heritage of their own country or weighty underground self-educated artists who failed to go down in history at their moment in an isolated Soviet country.“.
Read more: https://www.yet-
More on the authors, their projects and long-distance research lines, topics and tasks embraced by the interests of contemporary Russian photographers:
Julia Borissova
Julia Borissova considers photography a way of research and recognition the intangible meaning in the world. She thinks that act of photographing attemps to make sensation visible. She explores ideas of the image and the materiality of the medium of photography. She employs a greater variety of photographic techniques and styles. Her interest is in the conceptual side of the work.
See full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/focus-on-russia-julia-borissova
Anastasia Tailakova
Anastasia Tailakova is a lens-based artist, born in Samara, Russia. More recently, her photographs have addressed questions of temporal placement and the abstract “found”. Using rare, nearly forgotten cameras to achieve a subtle feel of the very recent past, she makes images that look like recovered memory recordings and induce a strong sense of nostalgia. While being modern creations, these pictures appear fragmentary and taken out of their native sequence, which is likely located somewhere at the advent of digital technology.
See full article: https://www.yet-
Petr Antonov
Petr Antonov is a Moscow-based photographer. After receiving his university degree in foreign languages in 1999 he continued an unrelated career, leading to becoming engaged in photography full-time since 2008. Currently he does freelance work for Russian and international press and pursues personal photography projects:
“My way through photography started when I bought myself an autofocus SLR and then on it was a rather typical journey. From taking pictures of the world around me, on to cracked walls and geometrical abstractions, towards street photography, then onwards to social documentary or photojournalism, and then to what I am doing now, which probably closes the loop. I was never too comfortable shooting personal projects on social issues, as I felt it was all about getting nice pictures in the end. Probably it was not exactly so, but I could not quite get rid of the feeling.”
Read the full interview with Petr Antonov: https://www.yet-
From the Inside. Tatiana Vinogradova, Elena Anosova, Mikhail Domozhilov
In this publications we combine three photographers, who tell the stories from the inside – from closed territories, hidden or strange communities, about unknown places and from daily life of cities and people etc. Presented projects can give you a deeper look to the individual people stories within the collective perspective.
Read full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/
Igor Samolet. Herbarium
Igor Samolet is Moscow-based documentary photographer, The main theme of his creation is human relations. Working on projects for a long time and in personal places, the author reaches the necessary level of truth and openness and gets the possibility to see not only the joyful part of life. Igor is interested not in outer reasons of his characters’ actions, but the nature of their intimate cravings and wishes.
See full article: https://www.yet-
Yulia Spiridonova
Yulia Spiridonova is an artist that focuses on the subjects of body, desire and trauma:
“I am driven by the idea of perverse. I engage myself in dialog with the widespread tradition of romantic sexual paintings, reborn in our days in the form of advertisement and mainstream cinema, which promote the superficial idea of being beautiful, perfectly fit, forever young, and perpetually in love. I enjoy pictures of »beautiful« people when they are depicted in the ways that are unfiltered and defy the preconceived idea of beauty. The most successful images for me are those that you cannot stop looking at because of the ambiguity of a beautiful subject portrayed in a weird, unflattering and even sad way. My pictures are about sex: sex that we will never have but we can’t stop thinking about. They are about the loneliness that we will not be able to overcome, loneliness that is left to us after all.”
See full article: https://www.yet-
Alexander Veryovkin, Yury Gudkov
Exhibitions of these two photographers have opened the 2016 exhibition season in FotoDepartament Gallery. They met through their projects in a physical space of the gallery. Nevertheless, the primary intersection zone of their interests is a space of digital photography. Specially for YET Magazine, we have asked the photographers to think about the similarities, common ideas and research that unite their artistic practices.
See full article: https://www.yet-
Irina Yulieva & Nikita Shokhov
Life as a constant pilgrimage – to yourself or after yourself, or to an invisible other who saves you. Maturity and pilgrimage are the two directions of motion, two evolving actions, two expectations. Both spaces are unstable and contradictory, somatic and ecstatic. They are determined by faith in a better tomorrow, looking like a ritual of despair, though. In this publication for YET we combined two projects by the photographers Irina Yulieva “Grazed Knees” and Nikita Shokhov “Sacred Procession”, making for each other in order to define the base of Being.
See full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/focus-on-russia-irina-yulieva-nikita-shokhov
Fyodor Telkov
This article is especially focused on the subtle borders of reality, myth and tales could be found when we are talking about the Ural region in Russia. Russian photographer Fyodor Telkov is probably the best artistic researcher of these margins, presenting his two projects dedicated to Ural mystical reality: Tales and Smog.
See full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/focus-on-russia-fyodor-telkov
Nina Dudoladova, Katya Yushkevich, Anastasia Bogomolova
The article brings together the work by three female artists who use photography as a medium to document their performances and to reveal different aspects of collective memory – Nina Dudoladova, Katya Yushkevich, Anastasia Bogomolova.
See full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/focus-on-russia-nina-dudoladova-katya-yushkevich-anastasia-bogomolova
Jana Romanova. Adopted Welsh
Traveling across Wales – a territory in Great Britain, whose people have been struggling for their identity ever since they lost their independence in the Middle Ages – Russian artist Jana Romanova experimented with her own identity and tried to become Welsh, following advice from local people.
This project is a first part of a bigger project Romanova is going to produce in several other countries and places where the struggle for identity is a big issue due to the historical and political circumstances.
Read full article: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/focus-on-russia-jana-romanova
Interview with Irina Zadorozhnaia
The last material from “Focus on Russia” articles – an interview with St.Petersburg-based photographer Irina Zadorozhnaia made by Salvatore Vitale, YET magazine’s editor-in-chief.
“If I am to define the subject as passion, then I guess I have one single subject as a leitmotif – altered/borderline states of consciousness. I only try to find out what affects them and how. How can they be transformed? I approach this question in different ways. For instance, the point of departure in “The Observer Effect” was a small article about the effects of zero gravity on the bodies of astronauts. Of course, this wasn’t an accident, since I found this article because of my general interest in cosmology. I wanted to get a sense of the way change in outward conditions influences the perception of one’s own body position and the perception of the surrounding space; and I also wanted to find out whether it is possible to make another person feel this by using a visual language.”
Read full interview: https://www.yet-magazine.com/post/interview-with-irina-zadorozhnaia
