Moscow. Forty Years of Life and Observation of a City Dweller by Irina Chmyreva

A Photograph: Many Truths

What is in Dashevsky’s photographs? Streets, people, the city. Sometimes portraits, interiors. He tells small stories. For the photographer his shots are like small elegies, which depict not so much historical anecdotes,—everyday life is too petty, it’s not every day that Pushkin and Derzhavin walk through the streets,—but the states of “non-quiescence” of the habitual environment. For the author these elegies are the process and subject of poetic and intellectual “small delights” (Dashevsky’s words). That which unfolds in front of his camera directs itself and in some unknown (some would say “magic”) way illustrates the principles of Philosophy and History proper. As if small mathematical sums, in which the theory of large numbers, in any case, is reflected.

Dashevsky’s photography may to the viewer, seeing it for the first time, seem to be outwardly of little importance. It, the whole body of photographs made by the photographer, begins to work as a large mass, gradually grasping the viewer’s attention.

Or it works through memory. I happened to see how foreigners, living in Russia as students twenty to thirty years ago, held back their tears whilst looking at his photographs, because they saw in them more and deeper than his fellow countrymen, who were born years after the time when he had photographed the lilac blooming on the boulevard or the hunched figures of drunkards waiting for the opening of a shop.

Face of the Russian Satire (Gogol). 1980s

It is said that a photograph holds many truths. Change the context and it begins to work in a different way. Attach a different title to a reportage shot, and it, instead of being a defence of its hero, will become a denunciation. It’s not like that with art photography (let’s call it subjective in order to avoid the terminological hierarchy of half a century ago). In such photography there is so much of the author’s impression that, maybe, it does not convey the historical “authentic” truth—there are too few informative factual details,—but it will fully communicate the feeling of the epoch, because feeling is something strictly subjective and poetic.

Dashevsky’s photography is an expression of the mood of the contemporary of an event, who is experiencing not only the (probable) importance of the historic moment, but also his own age, the weather, the time of the year, the discord or happiness in a family, everything that allows other people to understand him,—subjective photography, in this way of reading, is precise and easily understood without commentaries. Commentaries, on the contrary, only distract from communing with it.

Garlic. 1970s

Small Elegies

What are Dashevsky’s photographs as regards form? Most likely, for all that, small elegies. The elegy is poetic reflection, as a rule, sad in mood. In Dashevsky’s sadness, as in embroidery, the beads are of different colours. Here there are national peculiarities and the thoughts of an intelligent man about the time in which he lives, and the feeling of a little man in a big city and big state, in the cosmos, primarily, social. Life in it is like the flight of a meteorite, a grain of sand on a cosmic scale. But the entire culture of the Old World is directed towards honouring the little man, serving the cult of his significance and dignity. Within these boundaries the Russian classics of the end of the 19th century are so esteemed, especially Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, because he managed to overcome the national and cultural characteristics of the little man and make the feelings of the everyday poetically lucid everywhere. I shall not contend that Dashevsky’s photography is as cosmic in the elegiac mood as Chekhov’s works. But the fact that it works in the European space, united by a common cultural memory, and in the East-European space where the common history of the last century also has welded all together for long years,—is obvious to me.

Moscow, 2008

Self-portrait. Moscow. 2016