Enthusiasms

Alexey Titarenko. I’ve posted photos from this series before, without the artist’s statement. Part of it reads:

The idea of The City of Shadows emerged quite unexpectedly and quite naturally during the collapse [of the Soviet Union] in the fall of 1991. I mean that the concept itself stemmed from my impressions nourished by the everyday reality. At that period, I continued to work on my series Nomenklatura of Signs. Suddenly, at some point I realized that I was struggling with emptiness and that my creative impulses – initially absolutely sincere – were running the risk of contemplating upon ideas no longer valid. This happened because the Soviet people, all these human beings deprived of their individuality and turned into “signs” by a criminal regime, began transforming from smiling and happy-looking “signs” into wandering shadows, even though rejecting the role of a “sign” could result in the loss of life…

I saw people on the verge of insanity, in confusion: unattractively dressed men and women with eyes full of sorrow and desperation, tottering on their routine dreary routes with their last ounce of strength, in search of some food which could prolong their lives and the lives of their families. They looked like shadows, undernourished and worn out. Nothing like that had occurred since World War II, when the Nazis blockaded the city. My impressions as well as my emotional state were enormously powerful and long lasting. I felt an intense desire to articulate these sufferings and grieving, to visualize them through my photographs, to awaken empathy and love for my native city’s inhabitants, people who have been constantly victimized and ruined during the course of the 20th Century.

More than anything, I wanted to convey my “people-shadows” metaphor as accurately as possible. This metaphor became the core of both my new vision and new series. I placed my Hasselblad camera near the entrance to the Vasilievostrovskaia subway station, where the shopping district was located. The events occurring there were imposed on my already mentioned impressions, as were sensations stirred by Shostakovich’s music, and his 13th Symphony in particular, with its movement called “At the Store.” A crowd of people flowing near the subway station formed a sort of human sea, providing me with a feeling of non-reality, a phantasmagoria; these people were like shadows from the underworld, a world visited by Aenius, Virgil’s character. It was a place where time had come to a standstill. This perception of time stopped convinced me that it could also be stopped by means of a camera shutter.

Emphasis mine. It’s interesting that Titarenko mentions that the Soviet citizens had been turned into “happy-looking signs” by an oppressive regime, and then stranded after the collapse of that regime. But in this series, Titarenko is turning them into the opposite: they are hellish, depressive signs, but remain signs, as deprived of individual agency in Titarenko’s phantasmagoria as in Stalin’s or Gorbachev’s propaganda. Unlike literature, it is in photography’s nature to be particular, to depict a single time and place. I’m wary of the elevation of a particular into metaphor; this is a building block of myth, no doubt, but it also carries with it an undercurrent of dishonesty. Titarenko is projecting his view of the world onto a mass of people who may or may not share it—but he is the one behind the camera, and so he is the one who gets to decide which context to put them into.

That is, of course, something every photographer must think about. We are in the business of framing reality. The pictures remain powerful, but after reading the artist’s statement, I’m more ambivalent than I was before.