Kich-gorodok Olya Ivanova
Kich-gorodok Olya Ivanova
I shot a small town in the northern part of Russia named Kich-Gorodok. It is ordinary town with ordinary life, like hundreds of similar towns across the country. I went through villages around it which were almost depopulated and shot portraits of people still living there. At the same time my companion Anna Petrova, the philologist and anthropologist, retake the photos from the family archives of these people for her own work. I used her images for this book with a sense of gratitude. I tried to shoot in the same style as village professional photographers who were invited to make pictures of weddings, funerals, kids and feasts from the beginning of XX century. I wanted to continue local tradition of posed portraits ‘in the best dress with serious face’. It helps me to connect all these people in their feeling of being Russian, in common amosphere of irrationality and some kind of surrealism, in such a Russian combination of absurd and beauty, sadness and kitsch, family and history, life and death. Olya Ivanova
Documentary Romanticism Documentary romanticism is almost an oxymoron, like blue egg yolk. But it does exist. It appeared not long ago. This is the new photography. ‘Documentary’ because it is often related to an event, locally defined and ethnographically justified. ‘Romanticism’ because here we are speaking of a cold beauty that is detached (not originating from within), of half-tones and wavelengths, of rhythm, anguish, melancholy, semitransparency, anorexia, something ‘pale and interesting’. But there is no hint of satire, irony, jest, jingoism, serious research or statistics and strata — an encyclopaedia, in short — as happened in the previous century of the Enlightenment, and the era of magnum reportage in classical times. Yes, it does have its own infantilism and juvenility, its cockiness and lack of inhibition mixed fifty-fifty with hysterics and autism. Shots of five-storey apartment blocks at twilight, fish slit apart, the photographer’s own bruises, scars left by beatings, children’s playgrounds in the freezing cold, teenagers at holiday camps, St. Petersburg courtyards, empty parking lots, wintry Donbass, Moscow Zoo or truly delightful Vologda babushkas and little girls. They all take photographs in medium format, rarely large format, extending the semi-tones and arranging the image so you can examine it fixedly for a long time. There is none of Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ here, just frozen film and laidback music, their own impressions, like keeping a journal that fetishizes personal opinions and ideas.
This is also a generational, almost a hipster phenomenon. With their love of everything vintage, antiques and bowsand-arrows (documentary romantics frequently photograph themselves, as if afraid of forgetting and losing, of dissolving altogether in the harmony of celestial spheres). They are particularly fond of ‘cool trash’ — again, poetics associated with the ruins of romanticism. Both the significance and plasticity of ‘docrom’ photo series are defined by location: the year, city, season and weather — there are no specific or pre-arranged images here: everything happens incidentally, on the spur of the moment. Or doesn’t happen, in which case the photographer packs up his camera and departs with the explanation ‘Not my thing, sorry, I’m off’. This documentary romanticism now exists in the West: there too they photograph horses at night, old cars by the roadside, beaten-up girlfriends and disturbing suspense shots of every kind. In Russia such photography is printed in Afisha or Bolshoi Gorod and exhibited by FotoDepartament. In my opinion all this put together precisely expresses the celebrated ‘spirit of our time’, the ‘vision of the next generation’ that has moved away from Soviet heroics and news media or studio commissions. (Studio photography equates with cloying, slick sentimentality, the triviality of glossy glamour magazines.) That’s why I like ‘docrom’ so much. Anna Petrova
Nina Alexeevna Lobanova. Ploskovo
Valentina. Ploskovo
Nastya. Kich-gorodok
Slava and Alexey. Kich-gorodok
House inside. Zakharovo
Sergey. Zakharovo
Oleg. Nizhniy Enangsk
Unknown girl. Kich-gorodok
Forest. Kich-gorodok
Cafe. Kich-gorodok
Red Corner. Kich-gorodok
Nina Timofeevna. Zakharovo
Seedling. Ploskovo
Alexandra, Valentina and Maxim. Kurilovo
Sewing. Kich-gorodok
Seni (inner porch). Kurilovo
Maxim. Kurilovo
Oleg. Kich-gorodok
House of culture. Kurilovo
Vladimir and his daughter. Kich-gorodok
Anna Petrova’s expeditionary archives
House of culture. Nizhniy Enangsk
Ksenia and Galya. Kich-gorodok
Kitchen. Kich-gorodok
Galya. Ploskovo
Antonina, Tatiana and Nastya. Ploskovo
Twins. Zakharovo
Vova. Kich-gorodok
Football. Kich-gorodok
Road. Kich-gorodok
Nastya. Kich-gorodok
Kichmenga river. Kich-gorodok
Galya and Sveta. Ploskovo
Lera. Kich-gorodok
Angela and Veronica. Kurilovo
Church. Ploskovo
Dasha. Nizhniy Enangsk
Seni (inner porch). Kich-gorodok
Special thanks to folklore department of Moscow State University and personally to Sergey Alpatov, Vasily Kovpik and Anna Petrova. 2010
Olya Ivanova. Kich-gorodok Design Title Studio 2012