P O R T F O L I O Curated by Cig Harvey St Petersburg 2018
publication by NORDphotography
P O R T F O L I O Curated by Cig Harvey
Edition ____/ _____ SAGA, Norway, 2018
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NOTES
Wednesday Tanya takes us to the Demidov Palace. It’s hidden within a city block, obscure from the outside except for worn sculptures disappearing into the facade. Inside, the palace is now virtually empty. Room after room of parquet floors and chandeliers are a stage for our ideas. One room has been transformed for special occasion rental, with gold slip-covered chairs like a hundred gold teeth in the sunlight, and damask wallpaper that Ann K. uses as a backdrop for her formal portraits. Each of us has only 20 to 30 minutes with the models. It is both stressful and exhilarating, as we consider, anticipate, and ready ourselves for our turn. This is Stine’s third trip to St Petersburg with Elisabeth and she has a binder full of wardrobe and H&M ideas for each location. Others respond intuitively to the space. Thursday At The Stieglitz Museum of Applied Arts, the staff has been instructed to follow us around, but after an hour they drift off, bored with our ideas and we are left to do what we want. It is dark in here. No lights are on and most of the work is covered with curtains. I love it. It’s as if the whole place is a secret. Anka turns Maja into an angel and Mary Pat turns Dasha into the devil. I bring a rolled-up oil painting of a deer by a river as a prop to shoot. It’s agd and cracked. I found it at a thrift store in Brunswick, Maine for $36. In the hustle of packing up after the shoot, I leave the painting behind, somewhere in amongst all the artefacts. I wonder if one day I will come back and there it will be on the wall, puzzling academics and historians for years to come. Friday At The Academy of Fine Arts we are granted special access to the courtyard rotunda: Part storage, part gallery, twenty arched rooms filled with the student copies of great master’s sculptures. Historical figures piled on top of each other in crumbling plaster, enveloped by pale pink walls. It’s the history of the world in pastel. Aristotle turns his back on David. Titus leans up against Apollo. Artemis reflects on the wall and makes me fall to my knees when I round the corner. The heat and colour make me want to curl on the floor and nap. In one room, the paint has run out but no-one made a note of the paint number, so they ’re testing pinks in half rainbows on the wall. So many options, none of them quite right, and then the project, abandoned. The assistant going home tired and hungry, assigned to a different job the next day. On the way home we stop at Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral. It is full of Korean and Chinese tourists watching the orthodox Russian wedding like it’s a telenovela. We light candles and hold hands sending out prayers for Anna. She has been diagnosed with ocular melanoma the week before. Sunday A school bus of children arrive at the same time as us at Ilya Repin’s house in the county. It makes the guards grumpy. I can tell that Diane is happy to be outside on location. We leave the house and follow the signs to the beach, the Gulf of Finland. The light by the water is like none I’ve seen before. I photograph Marina. It is unsettling it is so beautiful. There’s no wind. No waves. The ocean is a lake. No sound, as if the volume has been turned down to one. Saturday The women guards in the museums are an institution themselves. One of them tells off Camille for twirling her hair and dropping the strands on the floor. A mafia of eyebrows, drawn on in orange. So many of the museums in St Petersburg use curtains to protect the art work. I recommend them for all institutions. Both Cicilie and I are obsessed with them. The combination of intrigue and the interactive element of pulling back the material is its own foreplay. It is the potential of things, I suppose. The curtains at The Hermitage are my favourite things in the whole museum. I know I should be looking at the Rembrandts but they ’re just so glum compared to the cream scalloped curtains.. Cig Harvey, St Petersburg 2018
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Camille Coleman Ann Kristin Sørbotten Diane Hemingway Ann-Karin Huseby Stine Loe Jenssen Anna LaBenz Cicilie Risåsen Mary Pat Reeve Cig Harvey ©PHOTOGRAPHY Cig Harvey, USA CURATOR, ©TEXT Elisabeth N Aanes ORGANIZER NORDphotography, SAGA, Norway PRODUCER AND PUBLISHER Tatiana Yermolayeva, Russia COLLABORATOR Jonathan Laurence, USA GRAPHIC DESIGNER Dresses from Tanya Kotegova Make-Up/ Hair: Grigoriy Kiselev / Marina Klyuchmikova Models: Polina Zvereva Serafima Chikalova Margarita Ushakova Eugene Vetrov Daria Anikina Anna Sysoeva Elizaveta Nikitina Darya Belobub Marina Vetrova Maya Buryakovskaya Locations St Petersburg: Fontanka 20 The Demidov Palace The Academy of Fine Arts Stieglitz Museum of Applied Arts Repin Penaty
ISBN: 978-82-691540-0-9, 2018 © SAGA, edition: 250, cover: Tapet Tex Leather, paper: 100 gr Cyclus
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