Wolfgang Suschitzky: Eye on London
Pedro Meyer: Past into Present
TCM’s Eddie Muller: The Art of Film Noir Stills
WOLFGANG SUSCHITZKY: MAN WITH A CAMERA — 34
Although born in Vienna, Wolfgang Suschitzky came to be known as one of the most English of photographers, in large part for his indelible images of London’s Charing Cross Road in the 1930s. Over the course of seven decades, including a parallel career as a notable cinematographer, Suschitzky brought a rare command of form, insight into character and awareness of social conditions to an elegant and emotive body of work.
ALEXEY TITARENKO: NOMENKLATURA OF SIGNS — 44
According to his website, Titarenko’s series Nomenklatura of Signs “was created at the crossroad of two different epochs, the totalitarian regime and Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika.” Delicately balanced between
tragedy and a perhaps illusory optimism, these deft collages offer a witty, profound and still relevant visual-historical narrative.
PEDRO MEYER: “I PHOTOGRAPH TO REMEMBER” — 52
Long respected as one of the most accomplished documentary photographers in history, the forward-looking Spanish artist shares recent work that reflects his enthusiastic embrace of digital tools and techniques, through which he continues to expand the expressive visual and thematic capabilities of the medium.
STU LEVY’S GRID-PORTRAITS: TRAVERSING TIME AND SPACE — 62
There are portrait photographers, and then there is Stu Levy, whose grid-portraits will challenge your expectations about this familiar
“Remember, the first rule of photography is patience. If you wait for the right expression or the right position it will come.”
—Wolfgang Suschitzky
genre. Levy began making these thoughtprovoking image constructs in the mid1980s. Combining different locations and shooting on different days, he achieves a fuller portrayal of his subjects while capturing time and space in a completely original fashion.
TCM’S EDDIE MULLER: HIS FAVORITE
FILM NOIR STILLS — 72
Eddie Muller, Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley host and founder of the Film Noir Foundation, is a longtime collector of vintage film noir stills, which were used to help promote the cinematic genre from the 1940s–1960s. In this exclusive interview, he shares insights on what makes a great noir still, how they were made and utilized, and how they can provide us with a deeper appreciation of these dark film classics.
SPOTLIGHTS
DARIA TROITSKAIA — 86
MARJORIE GURD — 90
JAMES HUNT — 94
FABRICE STRIPPOLI — 98
JACQUI TURNER — 102
ROBI CHAKRABORTY — 106
SINGLE IMAGE SPOTLIGHTS
ARVID FIMREITE — 30
JOHN KUHN — 31
DOUG TESTA — 32
JENN LAWRENCE — 33
OPENING SHOT — 1
BACKSTORY — 5
ALL THE KING’S WOMEN — 10
REARVIEW MIRROR — 12
EXPOSURE SECTION — 111 3
Cover: Oldham, 1946 Wolfgang Suschitzky
“When we consider ourselves storytellers rather than photographers, new possibilities emerge.”
—Pedro Meyer
David Best Mary Alinder had a long and warm relationship with Ansel Adams. In 1977, Ansel picked her husband, Jim Alinder, to head the nascent Friends of Photography organization in Ansel’s hometown of Carmel, California. Jim was the first MFA graduate in creative photography from the University of New Mexico. The Alinders had met Ansel when they were participants in a two-week workshop on Group f.64 at the University of Oregon. When Jim and Mary moved to Carmel, Ansel learned of Mary’s talents, and they soon grew very close.
“I became acquainted with Ansel through Jim,” Mary Alinder remembers.
“Ansel and I really hit it off. My hobby is cooking, and Ansel loved to eat. So we would have Ansel and his wife, Virginia, over often for dinner. To make a long story short, I had a background in English and editing. After we had our kids, I went back to school for an RN degree. As you can imagine, Jim’s income wasn’t going to make it in California unless I worked too. I went to work at the local hospital in Monterey as an RN. Ansel was, to some degree, a lifelong hypochondriac. He loved visiting me in the hospital. He would drop by when I had a break, and we would have a slice of pie in the cafeteria.
“In 1978, I was hired by
Maggie Weston to become the manager of the Weston Photography Gallery in Carmel. I already knew a lot about photography because I’d been on many of Jim’s field trips with his students. Because he often taught graduate classes at our house in Nebraska, I was pretty well versed in photography. During my year at the Weston Gallery, I could pull open a drawer and there were original prints by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams or Paul Strand. I learned so much that year.”
“Ansel asked if I would take over managing his staff in 1979. That’s when I became his personal assistant. I jumped at that. I knew he was one of the great artists of all time. I pinched myself every single day. I never took it for granted. I worked for Ansel until his death in 1984. I then managed the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust for the next three years.
“My first project was a reboot of The Portfolios of Ansel Adams. My assignment was to ‘make’ him write his autobiography. His deadline had been 1978, this was 1979, and he hadn’t written a word. It was up to me to get him going.
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs began as a chapter of the autobiography. I told Ansel that people wanted to know why and how he made specific photographs. He grew so excited about
“When we moved to Carmel, Ansel and I just really hit it off.”Mary Alinder with Ansel Adams (photo by Jim Alinder)
this that he kept writing until it was its own book.
“When I began working with him, Ansel had recently had open-heart surgery. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t given him an exercise plan. I started him on a walking regimen. We would walk every day, and I carried a tape recorder. I would ask questions to get him going. His feeling was that no one would be interested in his personal life. That’s what he would say outwardly. But inwardly, I believe he was very private and didn’t want to talk about his personal life with the world. When he read the transcriptions, he said, ‘This isn’t going to do. I write better than I talk.’
“I switched tactics. Ansel liked to start the day at eight o’clock. After breakfast he’d go to his typewriter and bang out letters and stuff. For the books, he loved using 3x5 index cards. The night before, I would write out one question on a card and put it in the roller of his typewriter. When he got up, he could look at it and just answer that one question. He liked that it narrowed things down.”
“With Ansel, there was never a dull moment. I met famous artists in a number of fields, even presidents. I went to the White House when Ansel received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Carter was so kind. He had become a friend of Ansel’s, and he credited Ansel for making the push with him to preserve hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness in Alaska. Another famous person I met was Georgia
O’Keeffe. Ansel and O’Keeffe had a very interesting relationship. It was a bit testy, a bit thorny, because for most of their lives, she was critical of him for being too involved with life. They had a great respect for each other, and they’d been through so much for so many years. I would never say O’Keeffe was warm, but just being in her presence was a memorable experience.
“I tried to never put myself forward. It was all Ansel, all the time. That was the reason for our closeness and success. He used to call me ‘Little Mama.’ We had almost a mother-son relationship. Meeting Ansel totally changed my life. He focused me and helped guide me in a new direction as far as my working life is concerned. But it was more than that. I greatly appreciated that he was non-sexist. He treated
me with respect at all times. He listened to me, and he didn’t listen to a lot of people. He always interacted so generously with me, and was basically a very humble man.
“There’s another thing I remember. He never liked anyone in the darkroom when he printed, not even his darkroom assistant. The assistant would go in, set up the enlarger, focus the negative, make sure everything was set, then leave. Ansel did all the printing himself. There was a day that I knew would be the last time he would print Moonrise. I asked if I could be in the darkroom to observe, and he let me. That generosity of letting me be there as a witness was a great experience. It taught me so much about teaching and sharing, about being and loving. He taught me almost everything that I treasure in life.”
“He used to call me ‘Little Mama.’ We had almost a mother-son relationship.”Chef Ansel Adams and Mary Alinder, Carmel, 1981
Dean Brierly
At first glance, the photograph on the opposite page may not seem like the most arresting composition. Its numerous visual elements— buses, signs, people, buildings—stake equal claim on one’s attention, while the early evening gloom flattens rather than enhances the spatial perspective. A casual reading isn’t likely to reveal much. There is no apparent center of interest, no decisive moment. Drama, whether romantic, comic, tragic or otherwise, is conspicuous by its absence.
But linger awhile, and details come to the fore: All-caps posters on double-decker buses advertise Film Weekley, Shredded Wheat and Haig Whiskey. A display case for the Astoria Theatre exhibits film stills on behalf of The Thirteenth Chair, starring Madge Evans and Lewis Stone. A newsstand notice boldly proclaims: London Explosion Picture.
Street poles decisively bisect the image into vertical thirds, aiding visual navigation by focusing awareness on discrete narratives: several people queue for a bus; others advance down glistening pavement toward looming buildings in the distance; a bowler-
hatted gent ponders the glossy likenesses of Lewis and Madge.
Nearly all of the pedestrians are garbed in overcoats to protect from the chill and are pictured with their backs to the camera, rendering them as a more or less homogeneous mass—with the single exception of a ghostly head poking out from behind the theater display column, stifling a yawn yet alert to the photographer’s presence. This somewhat comically dissonant figure, once located, arrests and anchors our attention. All of the photograph’s disparate elements seem to snap into focus in relation to his gaze, which seems almost conspiratorial in nature, as if its owner were sharing a secret joke or observation with the viewer.
It is this individual that animates the photograph, lending it context, humanity and existential heft. He is the conduit by which one enters not just this particular image, but the year it was made, 1937, and the place, 157 Charing Cross Road, a mere two years before England entered the Second World War against Germany. A year which saw London bus drivers and conductors go on strike, Neville Chamberlain become Prime Minister and Benjamin Britten premiere his Variations of a Theme of Frank Bridge. In other words, normal events unfolding during the still relatively normal pre-war era.
Embodied within this photographic tone poem is a culturally revealing and emotionally resonant sense of place and lived lives. Through a masterful control of light, film, chemistry and paper, coupled with a socially perceptive and empathetic vision, its maker has elevated and made significant a seemingly mundane tableau unfolding on the streets of England’s capital on a gray day in 1937.
There are certain photographers in the history of the medium whose images are indelibly associated with historical periods and places. The Hungarian Brassaï (1899–1984) will forever be known for his book Paris by Night (1933), a seminal portrait of the city’s inhabitants and environs. Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was the undisputed poet of Prague. No one photographed the transformation of New York City in the 1930s with such discernment as Berenice Abbott (1898–1991). While Bill Brandt (1904–1983) is probably the first name
that springs to mind when it comes to great London photographers, Wolfgang Suschitzky (1912–2016), the formidable subject of this feature, deserves to be in the conversation.
In common with Brandt, whose birthplace was Hamburg, Germany, Suschitzky wasn’t a native of Britain. He was born to progressive Jewish parents in Vienna in what was then Austria-Hungary, a military/diplomatic alliance that was dissolved at the end of the First World War. His father Wilhelm was a publisher and the proprietor of Vienna’s first socialdemocratic bookstore, along with Suschitzky’s mother Adele. His sister Edith was a Bauhaustrained photographer who would have a significant career of her own. Initially drawn to the study of zoology, Suschitzky eventually followed in Edith’s path when that ambition proved unattainable; he subsequently acquired basic photographic skills at Vienna’s School of Design and Graphic Arts.
The rising tide of Nazism in the early 1930s would have tragic ramifications for this creatively minded family, as fascism became the prevailing ideology in Austria in1935. Suschitzky’s father was devastated by the political climate, during which he was forced to close his bookstore. He subsequently commmitted suicide. Suschitzky departed for London in 1934 (where Edith was now living), married a Dutch woman, then moved to Holland and opened a photo studio. The marriage and move were short-lived, however, and he was back in London the following year.
It was during this period that he took his best-known and best-loved photographs, concentrating on Charing Cross Road in Central London. Suschitzky often photographed in the early morning hours when few people were about. This lent many of his images a unique ambience in which the city’s physical character registers as strongly as the people he captured making their way about the capital.
Looking back on this time, Suschitzky said, “When I first came to London, I was fascinated to see whole streets devoted to a specific trade; there was Fleet Street with its news offices and printing shops; in another street, Hatton Gardens, the jewelers had their shops. Charing Cross Road was full of bookshops. Each shop also offered books, mostly secondhand fare, outside, and there were always passersby browsing through the tomes. That gave me the idea of making a book about the
Suschitzky often photographed in the early morning hours when few people were about.
street and the neighboring nightlife district of Soho.”
That book wouldn’t appear until 1989. In the meantime, Suschitzky had to make a living. He assisted Edith on some of her photographic assignments and, with his favored Rolleiflex, took portraits for Illustrated and other picture magazines. He also showed his pictures to Stefan Lorant, editor of the photojournalism magazine Picture Post. Lorant said they were beautiful, but didn’t qualify as photojournalistic. Suschitzky later conceded that he thought in terms of single images rather than conceptually tidy photo essays. Yet each of his photographs told its own eloquent and detailed narrative.
A fortuitous introduction to the pioneering documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha would launch Suschitzky on a parallel career path as a cinematographer. Rotha was impressed by the visual sophistication and social empathy of Suschitzky’s photographs, and arranged for him to become assistant on a series of documentary films on zoos. This was right up the
alley of the former zoology student.
He quickly began photographing short films, many of them with a socially aware perspective (Suschitzky retained a lifelong leftist political orientation). Notable among these were Children of the City (1944), a study of child delinquency in Scotland; and Education of the Deaf (1946), which focused on the challenge of preparing deaf children to join mainstream society.
Suschitzky continued to pursue still photography between film assignments, which often took him outside Britain to India, Ethiopia, Yemen and many other countries. Two subjects close to his heart were animals and children. His first exhibition, in 1940, showcased images of the former; his first book, published the same year, featured insightful and sensitive pictures of children. His work frequently appeared in photography annuals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Suschitzky’s skills as both photographer and cinematographer shared much in common—a mobile, expressive camera; equal facility shooting exteriors and interiors; a concern with documentary verisimilitude; a gift for capturing and conjuring poetic atmosphere.
Suschitzky made his first feature film as a Director of Photography in 1951. Directed by Rotha, No Resting Place is a drama about an Irish tinker on the from police for murder. It was shot entirely on location in Wicklow, Ireland, and earned favorable notice; Winston Churchill is said to have called it the best film he’d ever seen. Other notable features Suschitzky photographed include The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) and Cat and Mouse (1958).
But his career as a cinematographer will forever be defined by two iconic British crime films: The Small World of Sammy Lee (1962), about a small-time hustler (played by Anthony Newley) in debt to underworld heavies, is an indelible portrait of a once-sleazy, often dangerous Soho, thanks in large measure to Suschitzky’s expressively stylish and gritty monochrome; while Get Carter (1971), with a feral Michael Caine as a London gangster returned to his hometown to avenge his brother’s murder, is acknowledged the greatestever British crime film. It also proved Suschitzky’s mastery of color, with which he evoked atmosphere every bit as brooding and menacing as if he’d photographed in black and white. All told, his film credits as a DP total
A fortuitousintroduction to the pioneering documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha would launch Suschitky on a parallel career path as a cinematographer.
more than 100 features, documentaries, industrial and commercial films.
Despite the depth and breadth of his work in both mediums, Suschitzky’s Charing Cross photographs arguably remain the essential touchstones of his visual creativity. As a street photographer, he was a firm believer in letting the image come to him. “I’m one of those photographers who like to wait for an opportunity for a picture to present itself, rather than create it by careful posing,” he explained. “Remember, the first rule of photography is patience. If you wait for the right expression or the right position it will come. It is far less likely to come if you try to force it.”
Suschitzky was fully attuned to the rhythms of the street—its moods and textures, its dramas and secrets. Body language, gesture, expression are captured so indelibly that one can almost divine what the people in his photographs are feeling or thinking. And Suschitzky’s timing was second to none. Witness the decisive moment in which a young woman nimbly jumps across a puddle on a rainy Charing Cross Road in 1937, something of a mirror image to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Place de L’Europe Gare Saint Lazare, 1932
Other photographs, like Kings Cross Station, London, c. 1940s and Oldham, 1946, are master class examples of how to arrange line, form, scale and depth.
Suschitzky segued from such muted street scenes to more animated communal gatherings as depicted in Stepney, London, 1934 and Durham, Miner’s Gala, 1952. In the former, a street in London’s East End teems with rambunctious kids playing around—and playing up to—the camera. Most photographers would likely plunge into the midst of the action in order to capture the Dickensian dynamism of the moment. Suschitzky’s perspective has something else in mind: He shoots the scene from a short distance, allowing him to draw a contrast between the closely packed group of swaggering juveniles and the solitary child in the lower-right corner of the frame, lending complexity to the mood and narrative. His viewpoint also takes in the brick tenements that hem in the street, their converging lines visually underscoring the narrow options for the residents—the city’s East End in the 1930s was a locus of poverty, violence and political unrest.
A boisterous atmosphere also pervades the photograph of a miner’s gala. Suschitzky has captured what could be called a cinematic moment in time: one miner riding atop another’s shoulders (the latter wearing a beatific smile), both men with arms outstretched as if embracing the sheer spectacle and emotion of the moment, as well as symbolically reaching out to their collective brethren. The sense of communal celebration and solidarity is evoked with unusual power and resonance.
Suschitztky took pride in his work, but without a trace of ego. He invariably proclaimed himself a craftsman, not an artist. “I’m not aware that I have a certain style or variety of styles,” he told his grandson Adam during a 2015 BAFTA interview. “I never think of that. I just take pictures as I come across them.”
Photographs courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery. Visit wolfsuschitzkyphotos.com to learn more about his remarkable life and work. Suschitzky’s books include An Exile’s Eye (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2002), Seven Decades of Photography (SYNEMA Publications, 2014) and Charing Cross Road in the Thirties (Dirk Nishen Publishing, 1989).
Suschitzky was fully attuned to the rhythms of the street—its moods and textures, its dramas and secrets.
London, Trafalgar Square, 1951
George Slade
You may want to brush up on your Russian language, idioms and socio-cultural history before diving into the work of Alexey Titarenko. The photographer utilizes some deeply coded symbolism in his work. The title, for instance. Nomenklatura looks like nomenclature, and the two concepts are related. But they are cousins, not siblings; nuance is critical here and throughout Titarenko’s images. (Nomenklatura of Signs is the title of both this series and a book about the work published by Damiani in 2019.)
Shadowy, looming, undistringuished architecture fills these frames. There are also faces looking upwards, behind us, beyond the horizon, which can be read as an optimistic Soviet trope. Citizens are looking to the future, though the promises and goals may be simply
pie in the sky.
As a New York Times reviewer described Nomenklatura of Signs in June 2013, the series, produced over three years in the 1980s, “uses montaged Soviet insignia and architectural details [and] feels perfectly in keeping with that period’s craze for semiotics and post-structuralism.”
Flash back to those heady tomes as part of your recommended reading, and take in a few of the following references as well. Not to put the “further research” cart before the horse, necessarily, but comprehending the density of Titarenko’s influences provides backstory essential to grasping his rich assortment of meanings.
For context germane to the photographer, review Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago (especially chapter 2, “The History of Our Sewage Disposal System”), Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s threnodic poem “Babi Yar” and the stories of Thomas Mann. Listen to Dmitri Shostakovich’s second cello concerto and his 13th Symphony while you’re at it; Babi Yar, the location outside Kyiv (Lithuania) of a Nazi massacre of Jews, is embedded in the latter, with Yevtushenko’s words intoned by a doleful, insistent men’s chorus.
While Titarenko asserts that literature has
Meat, fish, 1988
had the most salient influence on him, he also watched a lot of films as a young man, and “traces” from movies like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957) and Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (1987) have filtered into his imagery. The last, in particular, was made concurrent with the political zeitgeist that permeates Titarenko’s Nomenklatura series.
The net result of all of this Russian vernacular is, gratifyingly, a narrative with visual, literary and chronological scope. There are third, even fourth dimensions to this series. With all of these scene-setters in your head, we can now proceed to a consideration of the photographs.
As you may have inferred, reading is critical to these works. For those of you whose Russian or Cyrillic decoding is a bit rusty, the texts in these images merit translation. “Observe cleanliness,” for one. An ominous-looking sign, apparently fixed to four windows and supported by a defoliated tree, is simply an advertisement for construction supply forms.
(Other images in the Nomenklatura series take their titles from signs reading: “strengthen the world through labor” and “economize electric-
ity,” banal civic encouragement toward a robust Russian state. Titarenko refers to these as “slogans of colossal dimensions.”)
Some of the most mundane street signs in the portfolio, featuring T shapes and numbers providing locations of storm drains, are quotidian yet trenchant analogues to the cited Solzhenitsyn passage. When Titarenko’s photographs zoom in on them, as in Backyard with plaques, their utilitarian notations assume a very dark cast. A Russian never quite knew when or where they might disappear into the subterranean worlds of the gulag.
These are layered works, both conceptually and literally. Titarenko prints through multiple negatives, creating overlaid façades that press meaning into a single plane. He also uses brushed-on sepia toning to create greyyellow highlights in the photographs, a nuance that is lost in these monochromatic reproductions.
One might formally liken the final results to the insubstantial shallowness of the Potemkin village, all surface and no substance. This symbolism was what the photographer sought to capture as he developed the Nomenklatura. “Above all,” he asserts, “this series was conceived as a reflex against the stupidity and absurdity of the Soviet regime: a personal reaction to the strange or even supernatural manifestations of the system.”
One unusual device Titarenko employs in his book is the story of Simeon Petrov. The fictional artist, described as a “miracle-working luminary” and “the outstanding creator of the art of the Nomenclature of Signs, the supreme artist of our province,” is profiled by an “unsightly and humble follower, who desires to remain in obscurity.” (Also known as Alexey Titarenko.) Apparently, Petrov was “an authoritarian leader [who] proclaims the essential esthetics of totalitarian art” and who created all the work we see here and in the book. The essay twists and trips on itself, utilizing language that might be called Orwellian Newspeak in an attempt to generate an ideal Soviet leader who was also a lifelong fighter of racial and social prejudice. Here’s a sample of the text, in which the artist was subject to criticism about a series of decorative panels:
“Petrov easily destroyed his numbskull opponents by pointing out that the concept of ‘strictness of form’ was one he had intro-
The net result of all this Russian vernacular is, gratifyingly, a narrative with visual, literary and chronological scope.Leningrad-wood-paper-construction-supply-distribution forms, 1988
duced himself and had modified prior to exhibiting the aforementioned panels and pictures. The hapless upstarts were dispatched posthaste to the countryside to be given fresh explications. And the awkward incident was soon forgotten.”
Petrov seems superhuman in his qualities. He was, in fact, considered by some as an alien, or a one-time inhabitant of “another dimension.” He embodies the dense contradictions of Russian life, and Titarenko’s account masterfully summons the paradoxical quality of Russian leadership. There are so many mixed messages in the text, so many nuances to the narrative. “Discussions reached a pitch of such bitter intensity and so divided our small society that legions of specialists from all different fields of knowledge were drawn into studying the matter.” Imagine art having this potential!
We commonly understand nomenclature as a system of specialized signs and symbols. Nomenklatura is a Soviet phenomenon addressing what in American culture of the 1960s might be referred to as “the Establishment”—that is, the power brokers and gate-
keepers who influence decision-making and socio-economic ascendancy. As Jean-Jacques Marie states in one of the book’s essays, the nomenklatura was a “gigantic bureaucratic layer of parasites, thieves, corrupt people, and charlatans busy trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.”
This is older work, made in a time in which Russia was on the brink of becoming a global power. Titarenko acknowledges that the work had to change as the Soviet Union broke into pieces.
“When the Soviet Union began collapsing, then everything changed, of course, including the way I was making art. The basis of my world changed, and my art had to change as well. I finished using Soviet symbolism with the fall of the Soviet Union.”
When Titarenko was younger, a Leningradbased photography club called Zerkalo (Mirror) was the place where the artist became acquainted with older photographers and a host of other creatives. Titarenko joined the club in 1978 and began to move away from traditional straight photography. Zerkalo also became the setting in which Titarenko had his first brushes with Russia’s repressive totalitarian state; he eventually served time in prison and was fortunate that his mandatory military service commuted his sentence.
With time, his hometown evolved into a city with increasingly darker backgrounds. “By the mid-1990s,” the photographer states, “St. Petersburg was perceived more as a capital of organized crime than as a cultural center. I was depleted and disappointed.” He developed what he refers to as a “survival instinct,” a compulsion “to search for things that could bring some sort of moral respite, if only briefly.” Towards the end of the 1990s, the national currency collapsed. “The ruble became mere paper in just a few days.” The signs were gelling; it was time to decamp.
After having been a regular visitor to New York City since 2000, Titarenko took up residence in the city in 2008; he now lives in Harlem. In contrast to his years in St. Petersburg, New York feels like a “happy city,” and his professional life has revolved around Nailya Alexander Gallery, which represents him and has served as a meeting place for artists, critics and curators—his 21st century Zerkalo/Mirror hub.
New York has echoes of his hometown.
“Above all, this series was conceived as a reflex against the stupidity and absurdity of the Soviet regime: a personal reaction to the strange or even supernatural manifestations of the system.”One mask, two faces, 1986–1988
“My studio is on the ground floor, windows facing the street, the sidewalk. I see more of ‘real life’ of New York, the life that you don’t see in the media, a bit of a mix of everything. But on the other side Harlem is extremely beautiful, and its 19th and early 20th century buildings and churches, along with ordinary, very nice and cheerful people living here (we always say ‘good morning’), remind me of St. Petersburg. Sunrises in Harlem especially during winter are really amazing!”
Titarenko describes a perfect day as one during which “I’m able to create something beautiful, either during the work in my studio/darkroom or while taking pictures on the street.” Thoughts of waste-disposal systems, military service and potential imprisonment must be pretty far from his mind these days. Well, at least the last two.
Addendum
Images copyright Alexey Titarenko. You can view examples from his numerous bodies of work at alexeytitarenko.com and
instagram.com/alexey_titarenko_photo. Titarenko’s other books include The City is a Novel (Damiani, 2015), Alexey Titarenko: Photographs (Nailya Alexander, 2003), City of Shadows (ART TEMA, 2001), Alexei Titarenko (Galerie Municipale du Chateau d’Eau, 2000), and Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg (Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1996). Our thanks to Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York (nailyaalexandergallery.com) for their assistance in producing this feature.
“When the Soviet Union began collapsing, then everything changed, of course, including the way I was making art.”Windows with discus thrower, 1986–1988
Backyard with plaques, 1986
“I became increasingly interested in photographing the people whose cultures and ways of life were quickly disappearing in the contemporary, more homogenized world.”
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Robi Chakraborty Portfolio Contest WinnerWikipedia tells us that headhunting is “the practice of hunting a human and collecting the severed head after killing the victim…, and was practiced in historic times,” in many parts of the world. “Anthropological writings explore themes in headhunting that include mortification of the rival, ritual violence, cosmological balance, the display of manhood, cannibalism, dominance over the body and soul of [the hunter’s] enemies in life and afterlife, as a trophy and proof of killing (achievement in hunting), show of greatness; prestige by taking on a rival’s spirit and power, and as a means of securing the services of the victim as a slave in the afterlife.” Wow.
The Konyak, nature-worshipping animists, gave up headhunting when they were converted to Christianity in the late 1800s. Robi Chakraborty, an Indian-born professional photographer, now based in St. Paul, Minnesota, has worked extensively in India and the United States. Through his friend Sandeep Mukherjee, he met the writer Phejin Konyak, the great-granddaughter of a tattooed hunter, Ahon, a prominent member of the Konyak tribe. Phejin’s family still lives in a Shiyong village in the Mon District, Nagaland, a state in North East India bordering Myanmar. Chakraborty traveled there and lived with her family during the four days of shooting in which he made the photographs seen here. These images are distinguished by the beautiful, warm light on the weathered faces of the former warriors; and perhaps most especially, on that of the grandmother (opposite) standing in the doorway of her home.
Born in Kolkata, the son of an Indian Embassy staffer, Chakraborty has lived in Kenya, Tanzania and Nepal, as well as India, where he earned a degree in commerce from Delhi University. In an interview with Photo.com, he recalled, “Photography first crossed my mind when my father’s friend used to photograph wildlife in Kenya, where we lived when I was a child. I found it fascinating, and it stuck with me. Years later, I was sitting in a park in New Delhi having my lunch when I realized how much I hated my job. I
was working for a chartered accountant, locked up in a room day after day, buried in ledgers and journals.”
A visit to the U.S. Library in New Delhi introduced Chakraborty to an exhibition of work by Ansel Adams. He picks up the story: “I was blown away. The very next day, I enrolled in a diploma course in Photography under a Pictorialist, Mr. O.P. Sharma, at the Triveni Kala Sangam (a cultural and arts complex and education center in New Delhi). Other photographers whose work I admired, early on, were Yousuf Karsh, Henri CartierBresson and Dorothea Lange.
“As I took up photography, I started to explore the villages around Delhi, and I later ventured to Rajasthan and beyond. I found rural Indians very warm and friendly; they opened up their homes and invited me in. I was commissioned to do advertising photography and freelance assignments in India, though currently, I focus primarily on shooting for my own pleasure, most often on the streets of the U.S. and India.
“I began by shooting black-and-white film, and later, shot digital color converted to black and white. I now shoot both digitally and on black-and-white film. I became increasingly interested in photographing the people whose cultures and ways of life were quickly disappearing in the contemporary, more homogenized world. Rather than solely portraying novelty, I hope to depict humanity in ways that enable viewers to relate to subjects that they may never have the opportunity to experience in person, for themselves.”
Chakraborty is the recipient of the Photographer of the Year award from International Color, and of the 6th Annual Master Cup for his photo, Off the Ground, depicting a tribal child in India rolling a cycle rim along a village road. More recent honors include the Merit Award in All About Photo magazine, July 2018, and Black & White magazine’s Excellence Award in June 2018.
— Stuart I. Frolick
Lebanon, NJ
dougtestaphotography. com
dtphoto@comcast.net
When I stepped outside of my hotel in Tirana, Albania, I was struck by its vibrant energy, unique atmosphere and eclectic mix of buildings, markets and people. As I ambled through the streets, I noticed an older man across the road walking with a newspaper in his hand. I found the sight nostalgic and
refreshing. In the States, newspapers have become a rare sight due to the rise of digital media. Seeing an older man carrying a printed newspaper was a reminder of the rich cultural heritage that Albania possesses. I quickly snapped a photo of this man, hoping to preserve his traditional image forever.
