IMBALANCE magazine issue1 | spring 2014 - "Place and Time"

issue 1 | spring 201 4

IMBALANCE issue 2

IMBALANCE issue 1 | spring 2014

PLACE AND TIME

Editor: Alexandra Soldatova English version: Olga Bubich Web page: Maxim Dosko Informational support: Znyata.com

Cover: Aleksei Iljin "Photography and Time": The interview with Natalia Reznik "Katya's World": Aleksandr Veledimovich "Knights and Castles": Aleksandr Mihalkovich Aleksei Iljin "Forget Cannot Remember" : Zarina Bobko "Y Minsk": Aleksei Naumchik "Viktor Nikolaevich": Maxim Dosko

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Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former – Being – be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter – time – be addressed as a being. Мartin Heidegger «Time and Being»

The first issue of our magazine deals with the concepts of place and time – the two categories per se and the relations between them.

Photography as «a moment captured in time» selects a fragment of reality, that of the photographer; all other things which occurred off camera, everything that was happening in the course of time, before and after is thought through by the viewer.

Thus, the captured moment is characterized by duration in our perception, so there is no photography which can totally get rid of transmitting information about a certain place and time.

But, on the other hand, can one ascribe cohesion to the description of the world by means of photographs, if even by means of the language it is impossible to do it. Can one transmit the duration of time realizing that, strictly speaking, the description of time does not exist? Time is something we can speak about only thought analogies, models, more or less precise metaphors – geometrical lines or streams, for example. These analogies are not time per se, but they create a feeling, give meaning to time as something possible.

In understanding the concept of time in photography I find it important to recall Maurice Merleau­Ponty’s thought where he concluded that the essence of time lies not only in being the actual time, or the time which flows, but also the time which

is aware of itself.

Thus, the time aware of itself is explicitly present in the works by Aleksei Illin. In the photographs with a 6­months’ exposition time rests as a scar, burnt by the sun on the paper surface along the horizon line.

Time revealing itself in quite a frivolous way, is present in «Knights and Castles»

by Aleksandr Mikhalkovich. The project which had been initially planned as a confrontation of two historical epochs went out of control; the old camera failed to create an ideal image, leaving its signature in most shots, making the movement of the shutter actually visible, thus the actual moment of shooting has become almost tangible.

A weird twist of the place of shooting ­ contemporary Minsk – and a feeling of the late 1990s subculture can be experienced in the project «Y Minsk» by Aleksei Naumchik. For me the project rather reminds a memory, a feeling put on the background of contemporary scenery but not a real description of the current youth.

In the series «Katya’s World» by Aleksandr Veledimovich a certain replacement occurs when the image of what was seen by the photographer replaces the reality in the viewer’s consciousness. The photography acquires independence. It is made not to show the primary reality as it is, but to construct

our ideas about it.

Maxim Dosko’s project tells us about the inner world of an ordinary person. The world we see in the photos existed for Viktor Nikolaevich only in the course of shooting, the rest of his life was standardized, automatic, thus unnoticed for himself. Viktor Nikolaevich passed away, and his lens became a sort of small window, a peephole in the reality of Minsk backyards familiar to every of us – the reality which coexists with the other one we face every day on our way to the office.

I would like to crown it all with a quote

by Henri Cartier­Bresson: «…For each of us space begins and slants off from our own eyes, and from there enlarges itself progressively toward infinity. Space, in the present, strikes us with greater or lesser intensity and then leaves us, visually, to be closed in our memory and to modify itself there. Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again».

Alexandra Sooldatova

NATALIA REZNIK www.reznikdavydov.com

Photography and Time ­ You lecture a course entitled «Photography and Time» in FotoDepartament, what does this topic mean to you as a photographer?

This topic is important for me, maybe that is why I have chosen it as the subject­ matter of my course. Many projects of mine are connected with it – namely ageing (the series “Ageing” and “Necessary Objects”), our memories – actual and fake (the projects “Secrets” and “Searching for My Dad”). The issue of time has always attracted me – and in general it seems to me that this is a key topic for the medium of photography, since in some way time is our tool, just like the painter has his/her own brush or the sculptor – a chisel. Our work with photography is measured by fractions of seconds. ­ What ways do photographers use to express time in photography?

That is just what we were doing with the students during the course ­ which is, incidentally, coming to an end at the moment – we were exploring how photography works with the issue of time.

We discovered certain techniques and themes in photography that were directly linked with time ­ for example, collage and montage of different shots (the combination of different layers of time), photography of consequences (a special

direction in documentary photography when places of tragedies and disasters are photographed). An important method of working with the concept of time is creating a series of pictures, but here we come close to the language of cinema. ­ In what tense does photography actually exist? And why?

That is a good question. I think that photography belongs to present, encoded into past by the very act of photographing.

After all, just after having made a photo (this is especially well seen when shooting

by Polaroid or by iPhone), we already look at something that has been ­ and not at something that exists now ­ something has happened to the subject, some kind of microchanges.

Looking at the photography which has just been taken, we go back a few seconds ago. ­ In your opinion, why are archive­ based photographic projects becoming so popular now?

Their popularity in the West is not so great now. Curators and artists seem to be tired of working with archives – transforming into a trend, this tendency has been become mainstream. But in Russia, working with archives has begun only recently ­ and is getting more and more popular. I think this is due to the fact that only lately we have started trying to make

sense of our own past and our identity, reflecting on who we are, about our own personal (and collective) traumas. And we began to look through our parents’ and grandparents’ archives. They represent the archives of another country, the one which does not exist anymore and will never be.

It is important for us. Let these projects would not be at the forefront of photographic fashion, but I perceive it as our common collective therapy through photography. And this is what we really need now. ­ Tell us a few words about your project «Searching for My Dad».

I have always wanted to see my father — the last time I saw him, I was only three years old. His image was gone from my memory and I decided trying to rediscover

him through photography. To create a sort of memory for myself, a memory I have never actually had – a memory about the family.

Mom always dreamed of a perfect man.

When we watched the movies from the 60­70s featuring European actors (Belmondo, Delon, Mastroianni, Marais), her eyes lit up and she said ­ "I've always been attracted by such men!"

She met my father in Sochi, it was a holiday romance that quickly ended up the wedding. At the same time my mother knew little about him, they never had lived together – my father came for a couple of weeks and left again. Once my mother found out that he had another family. They soon divorced. After the divorce, my mother had destroyed all of

his photos.

secrets», please.

I still managed to find a few pictures taken in a photo booth. My father could not be seen very clearly there ­ the images are small, he was always wearing sunglasses and really looked like a young Belmondo. I always have one of those photos in my purse.

“Small secrets” is probably remembered by many as a children’s game which was popular in the Soviet Union. Mostly girls aged from 5 to 8 played it. For us it was not just a game, but rather a mystic ritual.

I really enjoyed it when I was a little girl.

Every of us created her own small secret — a tiny hole in the ground – and hid her «treasure» there (one’s mother's broken piece of jewelry, candy wrappers, little flowers, parts of toys and other parts of the "garbage", which seemed a real treasure then). We covered the "secret" with a bottle fragment and "buried" it in the ground. It was the most important secret and no one had to know where it was. It could only be shown to one's best friend.

We left the secret for a few days in the ground (but you had to remember exactly where it was, otherwise you would not find it later!), then dug up again and observed what had happened to the treasure while it was kept in the ground.

The earth was a bit of the underworld, and burying – a sort of an intimate funeral.

Sometimes we could not find our secrets any more, flowers were rotten or somebody found the secret and ruined it.

My project is about women who left the USSR for Germany 10­15 years ago. The main reason for the move was the ability to go back (repatriation) for their families, many of whom were captured, forced migrants deported during and after the World War II (the so­called "Russian Germans").

Somehow, I sometimes want to look at it and think about my dad being as glamorous as Belmondo. On occasion, I proudly show this little paper square to my friends ("This is how my parents looked in the 70s!") and they nod approvingly. Even if this image had never existed, it should have been made up and retouched in Photoshop.

For me, this is a very intimate project, it is a combination of documentary and fiction, where my mother's dreams are real, whereas my memory created on their basis is fictitious. I worked with my family archive, integrating the faces of actors who "performed the role of my father" with my own photos as a child. ­ Does the photography help you live your life issues, do your projects have a sort of therapeutic component?

Of course, my projects are largely self­ therapeutic. At the example of the project about my father it becomes more than obvious, of course. I enjoy looking at these pictures, even though I know that it is a collage. But still it is therapy, a visualization of a dream. And I think that many art photographers who work with personal themes, develop it in a similar way. ­ Tell us about your project «Small

I asked them to remember this game and try to play it again in Germany, making “small secrets” from the things that these women retained from the USSR times.

Each of them created a secret of her own using the objects that were still kept in the

memory about the life in the Soviet Union (kept both in her house and, of course, in her soul). ­ Does photography actually show what once was real?

This question is not so simple. I prefer to understand it in such a way as if something “was” then and it is already in the past, “it was” but not “it is”. What concerns the link between photography and reality – everyone seems to have agreed long ago that one should not trust photography, it is still a simulacrum. But it seems to me that this must not necessarily be understood in a negative way, because thanks to photography we can create fictitious memories, look at them, remember a certain picture and believe it. What actually happened in my project "Searching for My Dad". In general, to create a collage is extreme, of course, ­ but in fact there are many similar practices in everyday, amateur photography, for example, in family one.

We take pictures of ourselves to be remembered as a big "friendly" family – but, in fact, maybe there is no friendly family at all. But the picture still needs to be made "for the sake of the memory" ­ that is to be shown to grandchildren, relatives and friends. So, here there are also too many conventions.

Generally, the therapeutic component is really very strong in photography, everything that is connected with the construction of "the desired picture".

Perhaps, that is why photography is so popular today at the post­Soviet space: we design the desired images of ourselves in photos, and then we upload them in social networks to make others believe in their reality, and alongside with it, we start believing in them ourselves. For almost

six years I have been living abroad, in Europe ­ and here there is surely nothing like this happening, photography is not so popular at all, there are not so many photographers. Here photographers are demanded, as virtually every girl wants a photo shoot in order to look expensive and glamorous as some magazine cover girl Wedding photography is generally a completely different sphere. For example, in Perm (where I was born and had lived for 25 years) there is a very popular wedding photographer who works exceptionally with the method of collages.

In one of his pictures, for example, the bride and the groom are standing not on the background of our not very well­kept Kama river bank, but near the ocean shore, surrounded by palm trees. Is it kitsch? It surely is. But people want to purchase memories as another reality, to realize their dreams ­ at least in photos.

And it is almost the same thing that I do in the project "Looking for My Dad" ­ even the method of work is similar.

So no, it does not. Photography does not show what once was real. It rather shows what never was. But what we would like to have been occurred.

The interview was taken by Alexandra Soldatova

ALEKSANDR VELEDIMOVICH http://cargocollective.com/veledzimovich

Katya’s World We are ghosts. Behind the old wallpaper curtains silent actors are performing a play about our life. The wooden horse is galloping under Van Gogh’s stars and it is not quite clear anymore whether the self exists inside or around us.

We are changing the world, thereby claiming that we exist. Sometimes only Sergei Yesenin in a wolf’s mask can

confirm the reality of our presence on the planet.

Is a drawing on the wall a shadow of one’s hand, the projection of the inner world or Mount Fuji above which the red sun is shining?

ALEKSANDR MIHALKOVICH mihalkovich.com

Knights and Castles There are two worlds – present and past.

The knights’ club is located in one of the Minsk districts which was built in the 1970s – the period of standardization, deficit and economy in the USSR. Modern state architectural firms transform prefab houses which once used to be gray in their own way, making them correspond to their slightly mad tastes.

Porches are painted in pink color, bizarre geometric patterns appear on the walls, reminiscent of early drawings of suprematists. Is this a deliberate act or modern architecture or the post­ bureaucratic work of art which has already become classic (due to the presence of certain paints and a standard plan)?

Club members are characterized by their thoroughness and understanding of what they do when manufacturing armor and ammunition, sewing clothes and shoes. In the reconstruction historical identity is of crucial importance for them.

Choosing the walls of the above­ mentioned houses as the background, I emphasized the contrast between the past and the durable consumer goods of the present, showing how past helps people to survive in present, the multi­story castles of which have densely filled in our space, affecting people's minds.

ALEKSEI ILJIN

A 6­months’ exposition – from autumn to spring equinox. An empty juice box, black and white photographic paper, the pinhole used as the lens. Its diameter is 0.27 mm. The colors were not processed (scanning and inverting of the resulting negative into positive.)

A two­weeks’ exposure. The Crimea, Ordzhonikidze.

ZARINA BOBKO

Forget Cannot Remember Among old things that were kept in the garage I found a carton box. School exercise­books, children’s books with pale illustrations, postcards, and samples in words happened to be its main content. In one of the notebooks, where pupils were supposed to learn to draw calligraphic hooks and write down their first sentences, I found the first story which I wrote on my own ­ "At Elvira’s Birthday".

I was seven and a half years old, and the first thing I tried to do when learning how to write was to write my own stories. I do not really remember the details of this process. The vivid sense of that very question of the past had to do with the main character’s name. It came up together with the smell of wet paper and when at my age of seven years plus, I made up the name "Elvira". I started wondering whether it existed in real life.

The text that I happened to find was a direct proof of the fact that the story actually took place. That is something made up ­ an artifact ­ was the fixation of the period of time when the work of art was created, and in some cases of places as well. If instead of the exercise­book with the story I would now find an old family photograph of the father photographing me at the table at home where I was writing my first story, then ... then what? The exercise­book could have been lost while changing the places of living, the story in it might have disappeared, but there would be this photo

that could talk about some of the facts of my biography. It would be hard to say what I was doing in that photo, if I had not been commented on it, because since then many years have passed, and I could forget about what was going on. Would I have had the same memories that came when I saw a text written by a child's uncertain hand? Does the photo capture a moment in time and space, or whatever it depicts is just a fiction for the memory?

How can the photography be associated with the above mentioned coordinate systems, when it concludes neither of them? (I mean that the image does not physically last over time, like a movie, and has a three­dimensional extension in space ­ place – where it would be possible to locate something)?

Here I would like to start with the simplest thing – the method of direct associations. It is enough just to pronounce the words "time and place", and follow the associations that come to one’s mind immediately. "Time and place", first of all, generate in my mind thoughts about the event, and secondly, with what usually is closely associated with the memory and the desire to "preserve", that is something museum­ like, something documentary.

Photography is characterized by the fixation of the event, keeping it in the image and storing it (archiving). But for whom?

For the viewer who looks at an image ­ yes. For the photographer who in attending the event, does not co­ participate, but is passionately engaged in fixation and sees everything as a composition built by the specific camera format. And what about the participants of the event themselves? They were captured in the shot, and it is obvious that they were busy doing their things or talking.

But if over time the event is forgotten by the participants? And then, not always the moments which were important for the perception of the event by those people who took part in it would be captured in the photo.

While searching for answers about a possible link between photography with place and time, I found one of the Aronson’s texts, which refers to "a strange property of the photographs to capture the forgotten": "The paradox of photography lies in the fact that it shows us a fragment which seemingly must confirm us some reality ("it was"), and unwillingly it confirms something else ­ "is forgotten".

From the very beginning we are wrong, ascribing our own memory to photography: it is really able to remind us about the past, the event which lasted through time and space, but the rest is the field of perception and consciousness.

Capturing a moment is a fiction, because it is still can be forgotten, at the same time it is not a fiction, because what has been captured actually took place in the past.

This is what Aronson argues on this point: " ... any document is based on the fiction, any document is politically determined. If something is stored in the archive, documented, one should always raise the question: who chooses what to keep and what to ignore?" In this case, Aronson considers the overall picture of documentary essence in photography,

which is used in a historical context as a potential witness or as a document, adding to the evidence for the sake of the completeness of the past. But it is in this that we find the paradox of the completeness: it can exist as long as there are no documents, leaving the right to the participant of the event which has the attributiveness of time and space to be a confirmed artifact, a product, perception, personal memory, something in which the participant was involved, but not the conflict between perception and image.

Looking at my exercise­book, I remembered how twenty years ago I was thinking about the name of the story, and therefore remembered how I took part in the process of writing, but a photograph might not be able to tell me anything about it.

So, in which way is photography directly related to time? "The material carrier of time" as Aronson calls it, and I might add ­ a monument to time. In films a similar thing would not be possible: every second is shifted by the following one, moreover, video can be managed both by its creator and by the viewer ­ you can rewind it a minute back or five minutes forward.

With photography it would not happen: time, one­thirtieth or one­hundredth of a second ­ this elusive line is permanently captured in the image.

In my small series of "Summer at Grandmother’s" there is a diptych, where within the same space but with the difference in time of two years a girl is shown taking a ride on the same carousel in the same park. In the first picture the girl is alone, in the second one she is with her younger sister, who in the course of time was born and grew up to be photographed at the age of two. The space in the pictures did not change. When I

show this photograph to strangers (the viewers not involved in the event), their opinions fall into two categories: those who see the difference in time, and those who think that the only difference is that in the second shot I added one more child.

For some people time varies independently of changes in space (it is enough to observe the changes in the person photographed or new objects or subjects to appear), while for others time and place are codependent, in their opinion, people in photographs may be altogether different people. These two approaches seem correct to me, but I do believe that codependency is obvious here and therefore I use the effect of contradictions: time in the space has stopped, but the changes in life continue.

To ascribe to the image the attribute of time, it should include some kind of historicity: we, as viewers, should be allowed to see demonstrable changes or be given the opportunity to associate the image with memory. Denotative messages that the photography offers us, at first glance, a priori, must be perceived in the past tense. In fact, the situation is as follows: looking at photographs we, as viewers, perform the part of an actor who is included in the observation of the event, and from this moment it has a duration in present ­ the viewer makes a similar projection to give him/herself the opportunity to observe. One can find a particularly good example looking at various series: it is enough to remember a series of photographs of the bullfighter and the bull (one of the winners of “World Press Photo 2013”). This series is so powerful in making us empathize the crippled bullfighter who came back to win, that we level the thought about the completeness of the event.

Archival photography possesses “historical past” or event in the past tense.

That is photography which enters the area of personal relationships with the author or the audience, but only on condition that the depicted is not forgotten, but stored in their memory. In other cases connotations have to give a hint of the time.

[1] О. Аronson «The Moments of the Document and the Memory Completeness»

ALEKSEI NAUMCHIK alekseynaumchik.com

Y Minsk (Young Minsk) Studying various documentary projects about Belarus, I have always been worried about the fact that I could not locate myself in them. Depicting the country through the prism of such cliches as a dictatorship government, the Soviet past, the closed country creates a picture, which I find it hard to identify myself with.

At the same time, I watch how my environment and the city in which we live have recently started to change. Is it our proximity to Europe, or the arrival of the funds into the country, or just a new generation ­ I cannot say for sure what it is. But at the background of the old landscape new buildings began to sprout, the cultural life in the capital moved from the dead point, the city began to be filled in with movement.

With all these external changes, I experience the invisible, elusive feeling of melancholy and anxiety, the lack of clear direction for the future in my protagonist, who is excluded from the existing system of stereotypes. It is akin to the anguish that one feels when getting older.

What are we, this new generation? What is our youth? Where are its beginning and its end?

In the project “Young Minsk” I construct an image of Minsk, taken out of the conditioned context of the perception of Belarus; I am trying to comprehend the

questions raised through the fixation of my generation and the city in which we live.

MAXIM DOSKO maximdosko.com

Viktor Nikolaevich The photographs of this project were made not by me, but by another person.

Their author is Viktor Nikolaevich S. His last name is not disclosed, as well as his biography and other personal information, according to the author’s request.

Viktor Nikolaevich (from the audio­ recording): “Well, I do take photos. I like it. It used to be called “hobby” in earlier times, many people had different hobbies, not any more now. Now hobby is watching TV, well maybe some men enjoy fishing. In the Soviet times many people enjoyed photography, but most of them – manually processing black­and­white films or taking family photos. As for me, I photographed my family very little, working mostly with slides. I took photos of my family only on some important occasions or when we travelled to the south, for example. I have about a dozen or maybe more Soviet books on photography, I used to buy and read them.

Little was mentioned about the artistic aspect there, mostly they provided information on technical and chemical issues. I was interested in art, namely, cinema and music, but the Soviet people had limited access to those. I looked at pictures in museums and once I visited museums in Leningrad. I do art photography. That is, I take pictures which correspond to my mood, my state

and what interests me. What I photograph interests me, it is a sort of what is close to me, what belongs to my heart and what I want to capture and keep for myself.

Later, when I look through my slides, I recall the places, what I was thinking of at that moment, what life I had then, in general. I can remember about each slide, where I took it, what happened, they are all in my head, in my soul, imprinted, resting there forever… And if it is only for myself, my thoughts and my feelings, if only I know and understand it, then why should I show it to others? And when I do show – it is like a piece of myself that I am tearing out alive from my flesh. And if someone treats it indifferently or even ironically… For example, for my wife it is all fun, some childish staff that a serious man must not have, it is a waste of time.

First, she was always telling me to stop doing nonsense, to start practicing serious work, reminding me that I was an adult person, but later she got used to it. Well, let him waste time for rubbish, but at least he does not abuse alcohol, so let it be…

That is why I do not show it to anyone.

And thus, I do not think it would be interesting for anyone, I doubt I can make an exhibition… “ The full text about the http://maximdosko.com/viktor­ nikolaevich

project:

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