TEST PRINTS by Irina Chmyreva

Dashevsky photographed, selected, printed—lived inside photography—within the modernist discourse. In this system the reality of a negative is not equal to the final form of a print. To avoid sense distortion of re-publication (especially in mass media), exhibition is the best space for an author’s print. A direct contact between the viewer and the author. Eye to eye. Thus an exhibition print is understood as the highest form of existence of an author’s photographic work.

In the mid 2000s, when I was preparing for one of the exhibitions of Mikhail Dashevsky, he introduced me to his working archive. Negatives. Exhibition prints. Contact sheets. Notes, remarks. Everything was as it should be. Test prints. Speaking of the last, I was dazzled by the saturation of time layers and the narrative contained in each of these small prints.

When a photographer is working on the final form of presentation of his or her message, a test print becomes a working document of the creative process, an intermediate stage of the search for composition and tonality.

A test print differs from a contact print the size of which is defined by the size of a negative—a contact print is produced from a negative through direct contact without enlargement, hence the name. The size of a test print is not limited by technicalities. Test prints can be slightly larger than contact prints, as in the case of Vasily Ivanovich Ulitin, or they can be 10 and even 20 cm long. The point is that a test print being smaller than its exhibition counterpart should be large enough for the author to make notes to refer to them in future and control the process of creating the exhibition print.

A Vigilant Eye. 1960s

What was so dazzling about Dashevsky’s test prints? The layers of notes, squiggles, and cropping marks which recorded the multiple stages of searching for the final form. The palimpsest of lines and author’s notes, sometimes of varying colors, written with a marker, pen, or pencil, was an evidence not only of the work on creating a vintage item, but also of time, the change of epochs lived through by the photographer. The idea of what to include in the frame changed, the perception of the photographic composition itself evolved—and these processes were reflected in photographer’s work. The evolution of photographic vision is not a quick process: it takes years and even decades. Over the course of sixty years in photography, Dashevsky not only took photos; he reverted to his negatives, reviewed them, and reflected on their contents. He reread them and sometimes rediscovered. A negative of a candid photo contains infinite details which make up texts and are made manifest through the context of viewer’s time. A negative of a documentary image is like a book. We take it from the shelf, plunge into it and learn something new. Something that has been in it initially, but hasn’t resonated with our experience, hasn’t been marked by our attention, hasn’t survived in our memory.

Dashevsky treated his archive as a scientist turning to the records of his scientific experiments years later. An experiment was undertaken, a record of it was made, and the latter is an objective certainty to which one may return for solving tasks of all sorts and levels. At this moment, a physicist—which Dashevsky was throughout his “second” life that ran parallel to his photographic endeavors—is close to a humanity scholar, a lyricist for whom interpretation is not simply a fancy word from an intellectual small talk, bur rather a method of work defined by the changing context.

Entrance to a Dwelling in a Former Monastery. 1970s

Quantum physics of elementary particles and the science of human perception meet here today: a particle disturbs the space and observation reshapes the experiment. It turns out that our attention manipulates the events and our scrutiny makes them slow down, enlarge, and become significant. Today, photography is evolving as a field of knowledge and a photograph is transformed as a result of photographer’s work. This variable result can shape up in new photos taken by the author in the process of creative development or emerge from the analysis of a long-existing image. A new result may ensue from the material reality of the past negatives placed in a changed space-time continuum.

In the archive of Dashevsky, prints produced from same negatives in various periods differ from each other in composition and, consequently, in meaning: In his work, Mikhail Aronovich undermines the value of a vintage print being “the earliest print created by the author or under the author’s control for public representation.” He depicts every new epoch in its own vintage print produced from one and the same negative, although the new print and negative are divided by years and even decades.

This new print becomes vintage (in full compliance with the definition of the term—a vintage print intended for public representation), because neither its composition, nor meaning, nor the title have existed before. One of my favorite stories from the archive of contacts is how the Sunflower Seeds image has evolved. In the first version—as witnessed by the test print—the photographer chooses to print only the girl, a vibrant character. Later, she is joined by a woman in headscarf with whom they work in tandem selling sunflower seeds near Paveletsky railway station. A duet comes into being, a complex resonance of meanings, a clash of characters, a conversation of ages, tempers, relations with the world… Further, the crop boundaries expand to let in more of the world around the two characters. People are passing by. Then, in the photo taken long ago the author (his other self—more experienced and sophisticated about what to shoot and how) recognizes an archway with two women, the little one and the elderly. One might say that “the camera is zooming out” and the focus has shifted. Not in this case. Unlike cinema, where focus shift is achieved through the change of depth of field, the clarity and manifestation of old and new meanings in the photographic process of cropping are not defined by the change of lens perspective. We still see the characters sharp, but the surrounding environment is now included in the frame, remaining intact from the moment of shooting. The only point is that the frame composition (like parentheses embracing an explanation in a text) is swelling with more and more spatial details. The perspective is changed by time, i.e. time in terms of photographer’s experience. The running of time assigns new meanings to the already existing signs.

The Bark and the Twig. 1970s

In the test prints by Dashevsky which are his personal vintage (not for public representation, but for the author’s own gaze), there is a gradual expansion of the space seen by himself, space that he can interpret and present to us, viewers. This happens in the domain of photography due to the author’s changing experience which transforms the old image and gives way to a new one—in terms of composition, title, and even meanings.

As years go by, to the tragic silhouettes of the 1960s Dashevsky adds the image of the world they lived in. This is what he did with Vigilant Eye and At the Market. A miracle occurs: it turns out that the distanced past is not lost. Back then, it was fossilized on film like amber. It wasn’t presented, though. Whereas presentation, as an act of revelation of the hidden and the mysterious, is slow. The epoch reveals itself gradually; revelation is its semantic echo distanced in time from the instant (on a cosmic scale) of its physical being. Dashevsky as a photographer, however, made this possible and photographed the past for the future. Around the subject seen and appreciated by him at the moment of shooting, he left enough air which from the fog of the unconscious has crystallized with new meanings over the years. The life of one author contains the effect of self-cognition that deepens the cognizance of every act of his creation. It is not often that we, viewers, are in the position of observers (watching a photographer who observes), not often we have a visual evidence of the author’s inner evolution. Dashevsky’s notes over an old draft print, however, give us a chance to see life in its entirety and witness the change of world views. And all of the above takes place inside a tiny thing—a test print.

One more effect is perceived in the test prints by Dashevsky in the context of posthistory. They, created as a diary of notes of strictly secret work, become an object of public representation today. Time not captured in terms of history rolls over the barriers of epochs while the photographs by “a Moscow ant” (as Mikhail Dashevsky calls himself in his memoirs) reveal the past with a truly documentary candidness, as if reality has never been disturbed by a man with a camera.

Moscow, 2020

Self-portrait. 1962