IMBALANCE magazine issue 2 | summer 2014 - "People"

issue 2 | summer 201 4

IMBALANCE issue 2

IMBALANCE issue 2 | summer 2014

PEOPLE

Editor: Alexandra Soldatova English version: Olga Bubich Belarusian version: Andrey Horvat Web page: Maxim Dosko Informational suppoprt: Znyata.com

Cover: Julia Nazarova Interview: Jana Romanova "A Portrait with a Portrait, or a Life足Long Picture": Vadim Kachan "Not to Be a Photographer": Aleksandr Veledzimovich "Persons without people": Tatsiana Lisovskaya "A Letter from a Silent Town": Katia Smuraga Maxim Sarychev "Trolleybus Depot": Alexander Sayenko "A Skier "Selfie", or on Self足Representation in Photography": Olga Bubich

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JANA ROMANOVA www.janaromanova.com

­Jana, this issue’s topic is "People".

Can one take photographs not about people?

It seems to me, one cannot. At every turn there are people. Even when you hold a camera aimed at shooting nature, you still shoot about yourself. ­ What is your photography about?

I have recently realized that whatever ideas and concepts I elaborate I always start shooting as an emotional reaction to something. There is always some unsolved issue. And probably all the unsolved issues of mine are related to the question of why people come together in groups, where they take their ideals from, how they identify themselves, how they follow each other, how the crowd effect works or "what would Princess Mary Alekseevna say?" On the one hand, these are some very simple things, but on the other ­ probably they form the very the basis for social existence. It looks like I have some complexes from childhood ­ kids do not let you play together in the sandbox, and thus you develop lifetime questions addressed to these people. ­ When does a documentary project become an art project?

Personally, I see no difference between documentary and art photography. I think they form one single field. I have everything divided into other categories.

Into projects where people try to inform others about something, and those where

people try to highlight problems, to find a point of resistance, to pose a question in such a way as to make it disclose something, making it visible for the viewer. That is I may conclude that in my head all is divided into a monologue and a dialogue, informing and attempting to make art. ­ And are both the fields equally important?

Maybe for me informing is of less importance, but it is also appealing. I was always said that I did not manage to take beautiful reportage photos, and I did believe this. I do not feel the moment when I need to press the button when it comes to newsmakers. Somehow I have always been more interested in someone’s shoes or in the fact that a man in the right row was sitting at the next table in the cafÊ this morning.

There are photographers who originally have the feeling of geometrical, compositional, emotional correctness. It is rather a gut feeling, such kind of intuition, which, in my opinion, cannot be learned.

But it is okay if you have no feeling for a Bresson足like reportage, you surely have a feeling for something else. It is a question of open足mindedness in terms of what is "necessary" in photography and what you personally love and understand, not of

what is "accepted" or what "tough guys" do. To my taste, there is no question of what is "necessary", there are only emotions and ideas, and then how form works with them. 足Why should one do art?

It seems to me one should not do it. 足Why do you do it then?

I am not sure that I do art, I just have some questions in my head, and there are certain issues that are interesting to me and I do not know any other way to talk about them. All other methods are not available to me. I have not turned out to be a journalist. I am not good at writing texts. For example, every time I try to write about something more complex than "my pictures were published in such and such magazine" in social networks, in most cases I am not understood at all or misunderstood. That is, I cannot express thoughts in such a way so that I am understood, at least in the sense remotely close to what I actually mean. And when I take photos, I try to do everything as simple as possible.

But for me in order to understand something it is necessary to retell it. When I read or watch something, some moment may function as a trigger, as a strange and illogical association. Suddenly, one thing gets connected to another, and I definitely feel the need to tell someone about it.

Generally, in the course of life I greatly lack a Watson. In a sense, I use my students as a Watson, I constantly tell them almost everything that comes to my mind about anything. And for them, it also works as a trigger that starts mental processes and they also come up with something. I try to create such an environment where any person can suggest anything, and often we generate very interesting ideas in terms of how to do this or that project.

­Why do you teach?

I lack education a lot. In general I am a great fan of education and self­education, I constantly research and study something, I do it on my own, because my higher education passed by my head and my heart. While studying at the university, I was dealing with completely different things.

Sooner or later, if you are going to do something serious, you face the lack of structured thinking, the lack of big amounts of knowledge. I think this is similar to a writer’s job. I have a few friends among writers, and if they have an idea of some kind, they start exploring the topic they are going to write on, the epoch, the space, social trends, sometimes new sciences. Similar things happen in my head, at some point I realize that some things really interest me. Right now I am very much interested in studying criminology and I listen to a course of lectures on criminology. It is great and it inspires me a lot.

Besides, just for myself I try to sort through some phenomena of the contemporary art or literature that I find interesting.

When I teach or prepare lectures for my students, who are usually united with one idea, I try to translate this idea through different examples of artists whom I like or, vice versa, dislike. I observe my students, whether this idea seems interesting or not to them, and what conclusions they can make of it. This is an ongoing dialogue. I am very lucky that all of my students are extremely smart. ­ Why do extremely smart people decide to study?

According to my observations, when making up one’s mind to study photography, today people do not decide to "study", but they only want to hear two things: either "what are you doing is very cool" or "what are you doing can be cool if you do this and this." But it passes soon.

We all find ourselves together in the end, because it is important to have an environment in which good ideas come up, an environment where you are listened to, you listen, you have a sense of doing something common and someone who supports you. And already in the course of all this you learn something new from a teacher, whose work and way of thinking are close to yours.

Everyone has a desire of being realized, to do something and be liked by other people, and this desire is quite normal, but "be liked by people" should not become your driving force. Maybe in this case one does not have to deal with photography, and certainly not art. In order to be liked by people today it is enough to have just very beautiful pictures of sunsets, pugs, food and women. And to have them one does not have to be a photographer or an artist, it is enough just to like food, pugs and women.

You need to be honest with yourself, first of all. And then with the person to whom you came to learn. 足 Do you have the most favourite project?

No, I do not. 足 Are all of them favourite?

None of them. I consider being happy with what you are doing as a very bad practice. I am never happy with what I am doing. As soon as you think that what you have done is cool, it means that you are likely to have done it badly. Since you are deprived of any chance to look at it in a distanced way. 足 Are you a photographer or an artist?

If go deeper into the definitions, I am an artist, because I still use photography in order to translate thoughts and ideas, photography is not my goal in itself, but it is the only thing I am really interested in, what I really love. I like to think that I am a photographer just because every shot I make is about my love for photography.

Alphabet of shared words

VADIM KACHAN www.vadimkachan.by

A Portrait with a Portrait, or a Life­Long Picture In 2003­2004 I started to shoot a series "A Portrait with a Portrait." Each protagonist of a picture was holding his/her favorite (sometimes it was the only one available) portrait taken before, usually by a nameless "amateur" photographer ­ in child, youth or adult years.

Then I was interested not purely in the visual comparison ­ as the time or the years that had passed might have changed people’s faces. I also wondered what was surrounding my pictures’ protagonists, the place where they were living (I was shooting them in their apartments), as well as their reaction to what was going on.

All together was creating a story.

Above all, the story of their lives.

And all together ­ the country's history.

Ten years later, in 2013, I decided to return to this series and photographed the same people, but with the pictures that I took then, ten years ago.

Someone has already passed away.

This is how I got a life­long picture.

Minsk, 2014.

ALEKSANDR VELEDZIMOVICH http://cargocollective.com/veledzimovich

Not to Be a Photographer Once I wanted to be a photographer. Now I do not.

Photography, like any art, aims at replacing life. Reality is transformed into an image, memories ­ into a film and people ­ into square photographs. I am turning into my yesterday’s copy. Life has become a project for public demonstration in social networks or, at best, in some "contemporary art" gallery.

You can simply live. However, one must make a choice between "live" and "create." To do this you need to become Buddha, as Egor likes to put it.

Photography, meditation and Jesus’ father’s profession suit such a transformation perfectly well. As long as this does not occur, and one really wants to "create", it is better not to be a photographer and take pictures. Here is a paradox, so much beloved by bodhisattvas, or a borderline. Life itself decides when to make you meet new people, and there is nothing left for me than simply pressing the button.

The hardest thing is not to give importance to the process and not to create "the unnecessary." Impatience and desire to be creative generate "a copy" – a picture as the result of routine professional approach. My most honest portraits have been made on the "border."

Border passes between people. In this

space, life has a chance not to become "art", whereas people stop playing roles. I cease to be a photographer, and a person in front of the camera does not know who (s)he is. The portrait of a Stranger appears on the film. That is why I dream of humility, self足denial, and of not being ashamed of looking at my photos while listening to "Ramada Inn" by Neil Young.

Along this way a good picture is only the result that confirms that the photographer was sincere in everything: from a book (s)he read yesterday to the color of shoes and the camera model. An honest portrait is an indicator of the holistic and right living.

But one should not forget that everyone has their own life, and following someone else's rules does not make sense. Daido Moriyama said that picture was related to the search of existing images. In a portrait this does not work. Simultaneously with searching you create what you are looking for. That is why a good portrait always appears unexpectedly. It is always an uncertain experiment in which the rules appear on the frosted glass surface and immediately disappear.

A portrait is a sincerely created uncertainty.

TATSIANA LISOVSKAYA www.tanya.by

Persons without people To those who I have come across.

What a joy it is to know a secret about you. And remember your miracle.

Everything changed a hundred times. And memory is fragile and this truth works only for me. Over time the matter as well as the belief that this is reality would fade away. Only shadow and these faces would rest.

KATIA SMURAGA

A Letter from a Silent Town My dear unknown friend, Allow me to tell you a story of the recent years. To do this I will have to start from the very beginning, because being honest with oneself is difficult.

I was born in a small Soviet town, with wide avenues, green alleys and an eternal construction site. We lived in the outskirts in a new high block of flats with a noisy yard where everyone knew one another.

My friend kept saying proudly that her parents found her in strawberries (not with birds and the bees as all other children were told). And I did not know where I came from, my parents were always busy working hard. Since childhood the "secret" brought me to invent stories about my origin and not only. My first adventures began in the forest and a ravine next to the house where together with my friends or alone we found ourselves in the fairyland, and the world got infinitely expanded, until my mom called me from the balcony to have soup for my lunch.

Since then many years have passed, my sleepy district changed its definition into "a promising one", but, of course, in general, it did not changed at all, only decayed and a sort of became quiet. And I did not know anyone there anymore.

Having grown up, I tried to move to

another city, large and stone­built, and, as it seemed to me, a really, "promising one". However, my small provincial town always remained inside.

Once I caught myself thinking that for the last few years I was actually failing to become an adult and start "living a real life". I looked at the world around and did not know what to do next. It was hard to admit that I could not live in that new city, which did not manage to become a part of me.

I returned to my "boring" provincial town.

Rediscovering it for myself, I found out that it was already more than a thousand years old, but it was almost impossible to detect, to attribute. It was constantly destroyed and rebuilt. I began to yearn for the town’s past, which I could never see with my own eyes, I had only its ghostly image left. The surrounding reality was pushing me away, biting me, only inspiring to escape to the imaginary. And it seemed to me that everyone I came across in my hometown, was living in a state of internal immigration. Do you think this is bad?

I do not know.

I need to confess that I am afraid of the future, which is likely to be more concrete, rational and synthetic. But I decided to do all I can and give up all the attempts to be "an adult". In future I want

to see more poetry than psychoanalysis, more naivety and innocence. After all, life is much more than all of our ideas about life, isn’t it?

Dear friend, let life go on, even if childhood keeps resting.

I hope that observing my friends’ eyes, you will feel some closeness to them. Let the photos continue the story better than I could do in words.

Hugs, Katia S. from Vitebsk.

February, 10 2014

MAXIM SARYCHEV http://sarychev.org/

***

Every day I talk to people whom often I have never met in person. Those are programmers and managers from different parts of the world. It turns out that I see those almost complete strangers more regularly than my own relatives.

The pictures were made through webcams during business conferences via Skype applications and Google Hangout.

Webcams expand the privacy borders of telephone conversations. Our facial expressions, emotions and personal space become visible to interlocutors.

ALEXANDR SAYENKO http://asayenko.com/

Trolleybus Depot These are people, simple and at the same time such extraordinary, as if coming down from picturesque masterpieces.

And yet, these are pictures, pictures of a city no足one sees or feels, no足one even thinks about its existence. The city of the trolleybus depot.

This mysterious and romantic dark place with incredible shades of yellow, green and blue.

People appear close, almost in front of the camera, keeping an eye足contact. For all their reality, they leave behind the feeling of a fairy足tale, like mysterious trolls who hide inside a dark tree trunk where sunlight barely enters.

A SKIER’S «SELFIE», or ON SELF­REPRESENTATION in PHOTOGRAPHY Olga Bubich

If you are irritated by people, who constantly photograph themselves, stop reading right here. They have won.

(Gennadyi Zavolokin, «The World of the Year:”Selfie”) [5]]

A famous episode of the participation of Pope Francis in the group selfie, which, according to mass media, only enhanced his status of the bravest and most democratic leader of the Catholic church in recent years.

In the vast territory of Europe and its neighbouring countries it is difficult to find someone who has never heard a word “selfie” or has never experienced that tricky itching in the fingers caused by the

desire to capture oneself with a compact or a reflex camera, or with an iphone.

Yahoo predicts the growth in the number of photos with the selfie hashtag in Instagram to the point of no less than one

billion [1]. In December 2012 Time Magazine puts this trendy term for a kind of a quick self­portrait in the list of the most popular words in history.

Researching the World Wide Web archives you realize that today the genre of a self­portrait has really reached its peak of popularity: neither presidents, nor religious leaders or astronauts overlook producing “phone selfies”. Why so? It happens not only due to the formal ease and accessibility of media resources and photoequipment with the adequate image quality, but, above all, due to certain changes in the values of today’s people.

The catharsis of individualism which

found its expression in the exacerbation of the function of representation captured post­Soviet countries, too. The desire to document one’s own existence, multiplying digital traces in the wilds of various social networks practically became a driving need of each inhabitant of the earth in the age group “10 +”.

In the course of the 20th century, according to the authors of the book “Me/We Generation”, individualism boldly captured mass market. Economic development, urbanization and industrialization only favoured the growth of individualism, determining a shift from basic needs to the needs of self­comfort.

A group selfie from the author’s newsfeed in one of the social networks.

Now it is important not only just to eat something (put some clothes on, visit some place...), but also to eat something beautiful. A happy family holiday photos of on a coffee table in the living room alone was not enough to confirm that everything is all right with your life. Now any person can boldly take on the role of a headline in the press, harmoniously fitting into a newsfeed of a couple hundred of virtual friends, somewhere among news about political instability, fuel prices or sales in a nearby shop. Thus, the researcher Nicholas Carr in his work entitled «The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains» argues that it is the Internet and mobile phones which have changed the self­perception and thinking of “the photographing man”. If earlier people’s central motive was in recording and preserving phenomena, now it is actually the production of news about oneself that comes to the fore.

“Everyone has got his/her mouthpiece (LiveJournal, Facebook) and a theoretical possibility not only to speak, but to be heard,” ­ said Michael Kareev, the lecturer and blogger at “T&P”. [2] As soon as the global scale headlines lose their exclusivity and personal significance, the pictures of your Moscow friend with a freshly shaved head might find their place as your Facebook top news. Carr calls this trend “functional narcissism” which the average user needs to be recognized and heard of. “Selfie is just the most convenient form to reach this goal. It allows you to be quickly embedded into the global data flow,” ­ says the researcher.

The thing is that images are perceived by a person with a much higher speed and at lower costs of holding concentration. Our brain decodes images and short texts

(memes, statuses, etc) gradually getting used to the chaotic way of thinking. And under such circumstances a regular five­ minutes’ evening email check may occur to be keeping you online with the first rays of the rising sun lightening your sleepy face. “Just like a diver, I used to immerse into the depths of the ocean of words. Now I slide across the surface like a water­skier,”­ Carr confesses in the description his online habits, summarizing that today Google is making us more stupid, whereas social networks bring up a generation of superficial Narcissuses. [2] Moreover, selfie is directly connected with communication. The psychologist Pamela Rutledge, for example, defines it as «a message, involvement into a dialogue, encouragement or discussion of one’s actions». [1] Ignoring such messages might be interpreted by the initiator of the polylogue as a groundless silence in reply to the question «how are you?». Being placed into an Instagram or social network newsfeed, self­portrait must inevitably raise a virtual feedback, be noticed and commented. It may seem ridiculous, but last week one of my 30­ years­old friends quite seriously spoke about dramatical changes in his relations with a famous Belarusian journalist just because “she did not put enough “likes” under his Facebook posts and photos”... .

Nevertheless, the opposite trend which characterizes the genre of self­portrait in contemporary photography also seems to be very interesting to observe. While an ordinary person continues to play rough with colorful packaging and presentation of him/herself as “a social product” [1], people more sensitive to the depths of introspection (artists, photographers, etc.) continue to go farther away from the idea of mixing market and self­representation,

making images of their own physical "selves" exposed to existential experiments. Thus, a portrait gradually becomes an instrument of private search, where the individual photographer or someone (s)he points the lens at, only kindles a spark in the viewer’s fantasy in

also see objects that prevent us from seeing the face of the person portrayed, actually only hinting at the impossibility of recognition. The works of the American photographer Lee Friedlander present a classical example of such works. He was catching his own reflections and shadows

Valeria Pishchuck self­portrait

finishing up stories with numerous unknowns. [3] The critic Charlotte Cotton believes that one of the visual methods used by contemporary photographers in their attempts to transmit the feeling of anxiety and insecurity in terms of the messages decoded in an image, is depicting human figures whose faces are somehow hidden or turned away from the viewer. Besides the angle itself, in photographs one can

in car rear­view mirrors, shop­windows and even on the backs of random passers­ by. It is hard to imagine anything more «аnti­narcisstic»: in the photo with a light bulb covering most of the photographer’s face the very essence of the self­portrait is sincerely postulated as egocentric nonsense.

Thus, the nature of a person portrayed remains unrevealed, the photographer does not provide us with enough

Lee Friedlander’s self­portrait, Hillcrest, New Yourk, 1970

information to form our understanding about the visual center of the photography – that of the human face. In search of visual clues the viewer is left to involve the entire arsenal of empathy and observation, considering, for example, various objects present in the shot (the chaos of the city suburbs, objects in the room, clothes, furniture) and to do this ... (s)he is most likely not to have enough time.

Since we just need to slide on.

Self­portraits by Tatiana Lisovskaya (left) and Anastasiya Shilina (right)

1 ­ http://m.total.kz/hitech/internet/polzovateli_stanovyatsya_idiotami_ili_glavnye 2 ­ http://theoryandpractice.ru/posts/1913­budushchee­mediapotrebleniya­komu­ nuzhen­mozg­kogda­est­google 3 ­ http://www.znyata.com/o­foto/narrativ­photography­2.html 4 ­ http://www.americansuburbx.com/series­2/l/lee­friedlander­self­portrait 5 ­ http://siliconrus.com/2013/11/slovo­goda­selfi/

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