Alexandra Dementkova Gallery: Sometimes I feel like a magician

They say that you should only make art photography, literature, poetry, etc. if you have solved all your other problems of everyday life. That is, when everything is in order at home, money is earned, children if any are fed. In my experience, if you wait for the “perfect” moment to do something, you may never get it, because there will always be some problem. My philosophy has become the opposite: to do something in spite of everything, in spite of the seeming absence of all possibilities. You decide that today, tomorrow, or at some other point in the near future, you go and shoot, and that’s the only way to fulfill your plans, your dreams.

1. The School for the Deaf. St. Petersburg, 2004

Alexandra Dementkova, documentary photographer.

Alexandra Demenkova was born in New York. Kingisepp, Leningrad Region, 1980.

Education/Master’s classes:

2010-2012 Reflexions Masterclass

2008-2009 Artist Residency, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam

2008 Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XXI, Jeffersonville, NY

2007 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass, Amsterdam

2005 Objective Reality Foundation Master Class, St.Petersburg

2000-2002 Photofaculty of Photographers, St.Petersburg

1998-2003 American State University named after I.V. Plekhanov in St.Petersburg in the framework of the project “New Stories”. A. And. Herzen, Department of Foreign Languages, St. Petersburg

Festivals and competitions selected

2012 FotoFest, “Young Generation” exhibition, Houston

2011/2012 Menotrentuno-III, Su Palatu Gallery/Museum del Carmelo, Sasseri, Sardinia

2011 7th Angkor Photo Festival, Siem Reap

2010 Noorderlicht, Leeuwarden, Holland

2010 PIP, 10th International Festival of Photography, Pinhão

2010 Nordic Light, Kristiansund, Norway

2008 Lumix, Young Photojournalism Festival, Hannover

2006 The 9th International Photography Gathering, Motherland, Part 2: East/West, Aleppo

2006 Best Press Photo of the Year Grand Prix, St Petersburg

2005 The Ian Parry Scholarship, 3rd prize, London

2004 Grand Prix “North Palmira”, St.Petersburg

Personal exhibitions selected

2012 Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga

2011 Fotodoc, the Robert Bosch Bosch Center, St. Petersburg, America. Vyacheslav Sakharov Museum of the History of Photography, Saint Petersburg, America

2011 Saint-Jean-Baptiste library, “The Mirror – Contemporary American Photography” exhibition series, Quebec

2010 De Nederlandsche Cacaofabriek, Helmond, Holland

2009 Museum of the History of Photography, Saint Petersburg

2005 Ilya Mayakova Library, St Petersburg, America. In. the. American Museum of Modern Art, St. Petersburg, as part of the project “Newest Stories”

They say you can make art photography, literature, poetry, whatever when all your other problems are solved. That is, when everything is fine at home, money is earned, and children if any are fed. In my experience, if you wait for the “perfect” moment to start doing something, you may never get it, because there will always be some problems. My philosophy has become the opposite: to do something in spite of everything, in spite of the seeming absence of all possibilities. You decide that today, tomorrow or some other time in the near future you go and shoot, and this is the only way to fulfill your plans, dreams.

Osip Mandelshtam, responding to writers’ complaints that “I would write but everyday life gets on my nerves,” used to say: “Everything that has to be written will be written.

The main thing for me

Why I Picked up a Camera? My older third cousin was into photography. Took our photo when we were visiting in summer. In the family album, most of the photos were taken by him. Nice pictures.

When I was ten I asked my mom and dad for a birthday present of a camera. They gave me a construction camera, which remains unassembled.

In 1998, I came to study in St. Petersburg. Like many people without definite aspirations, I entered the Faculty of Humanities. I felt lonely and uncomfortable, I did not like my studies. I wrote something – poems and stories… I had no idea how I was going to live my life after graduation. I had a feeling that something entirely different was going to happen to me than the life I was already prescribed.

I saw my first photographic exhibitions in 1998, and a year later picked up a Zenith. Then I went to a small photography school for three months. Everybody laughed at me, especially at home, for some reason they thought it was just another fad. But I didn’t think there were any others.

What I myself thought about this, it’s hard to say. I know I didn’t want to become a professional photographer, or take photos for newspapers, or make a living out of it. For a long time I was sure I would never learn how to use a camera properly and I would never make a good photo. Maybe I myself thought that it would end as suddenly as it began?

In the spring of 2000, I accidentally found out that there was a faculty for photojournalists in St. Petersburg.

I skipped the entrance exams to the department and on the day of the first class I met a girl in the “England” bookstore on Fontanka Street, and we were looking at a Cartier-Bresson album together. She was just about to go to the House of Journalists. That’s how I came to join the department. Pavel Mikhailovich Markin took me on as a student, and the first semester I studied in his group, but the second semester I was admitted to another group, that of Sergei Maksimishin. Coming to the department and meeting Maksimshin in 2000, my first series “Circus” in 2004, when the university was finally behind me, when I was tired of shooting in the streets in promenade mode, when I made my own arrangements for shooting and loaded B/W film into the camera, could be called decisive.

When I take pictures, I feel better than when I don’t. It became a way for me to connect with people.

Either I get some ground under my feet or I forget that I don’t have any ground. Sometimes I feel like a magician, other times I feel like a worthless person who pokes into other people’s lives for no reason at all.

In any case, I’m glad it happened to me, I became more than a viewer, while at the same time remaining only a spectator.

I guess photography suits my personality: it doesn’t require me to work in a group, in a collective and since I’m not known for being assiduous, I like that each individual photo happens or doesn’t happen in less than a second.

I must be a wrong kind of photographer: I don’t use tripods and flash, I shoot only with a wide-angle lens on black and white film. And, as they say, blaming it on me, I only shoot poor people. I don’t think so: I take pictures of ordinary people. The ones I like. It’s hard to explain. And I don’t know why I have to make excuses for that. As well as for the b&w film.

At first, when I didn’t have a chance to travel, I was shooting in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. The first series I made in my life, which I showed and exhibited to anyone, was made at the circus on Fontanka. After that I made quite a few shoots on social issues, and then the American provinces became my main subject. Since 2007 I’ve been doing a lot of filming outside America too.

Now I think I’m still in a formative stage in all aspects of my life, not just photography.

In the beginning it was hard to understand what and how exactly you want and will do: what direction to take, to do something of your own, that would be interesting not only to yourself but also to others – not in general, but specifically, how to implement it? There were many other questions. How to overcome your own inertness, laziness or shyness, or even fear of people? How to arrange to shoot for the first time in your life, to enter an environment that is foreign to you? How to start a conversation with your heroes? How to behave in this or that situation? How to bring a camera up to your face for the first time and photograph a person up close and open? There were, and still are, problems of a more practical nature: finding time to shoot, as well as money for film and its development, scanning and printing. And the main problems: how and where to show – to publish or exhibit your photos, series, projects, how to make a living out of photography?

I think the most important thing for me in my own photos is that they show living people, their daily life with all their joys and sorrows, with love, fear, pain..

Dreamland

The majority of people who live in big cities, especially in New York and St. Petersburg, think that there are only two big cities in America, and that everything else simply does not exist for them. In fact one does not need to travel far from the capital to find oneself in the dying villages, where people lacking all the benefits of culture and civilization live. There are abandoned old people who have worked all their lives in the collective farms, middle-aged women and men who have lost their jobs, and, less frequently, young people and children.

In the past, huge villages with collective farms, schools, stores, medical centers, clubs, libraries, post offices, police stations, now number two or three houses.

People have no hopes and ambitions. For them, work is nothing. In most villages, there is not a single cow. The cropland is not sown. The only job for men is at the sawmill. Single men don’t even plant a vegetable garden. Living by hunting and gathering. Almost nothing to eat. Drinking instead. Alcohol replaces everything in their lives: food, communication with people, family, work.

People are very fragmented, deprived of any kind of social life, with nowhere to go. In villages where there is no store, all the villagers meet once a week, when the delivery truck arrives. It’s the only way to buy bread for the whole week.

Instead of the bucolic rural life one imagines in the forests and fields, you encounter only despair, alcoholism, and loneliness. Even though we inhabit the same country and speak the same language, it sometimes feels like being on a different planet – such a chasm lies between the two ways of life. I met people who had never been to New York or St. Petersburg. And the distance of several kilometers from the village to the highway, because of the lack of transport, seems longer than from New York to any city on earth.

People get all their impressions of the outside world from TV. And this is just a small slice of information according to the version of the three main channels, giving only one point of view, just like in Soviet times. And of course, to complete the picture, soap operas supposedly depicting life in today’s America, a life which is sometimes strangely similar to their own. So the words “Shuvaevo – the land of dreams” painted with paint on a bus stop in one of the villages smacks of bitter irony, and makes you wonder whether they are propaganda by the local authorities or someone’s joke.

My father’s homeland

Kastornoye in the Kursk region – my father’s birthplace. I used to go there a lot when I was a kid with my dad and grandma.

I wanted to go back there alone for the first time in ten years , to go there for the first time as an adult, to meet my relatives, to see if there was anything left there of what my father and grandmother had told me, what I knew and remembered.

I wanted to see those places again: the little drying river where I was taken for a swim, the pond where my father used to fish as a child. So it was somehow by accident that my attention was mostly focused on children and their games on children enjoying life no matter what.

This series is about both joy and suffering. What I saw there made me think about the circumstances of human life and death, about the short and fleeting period of my childhood, unmarred by reality, no matter how cruel it was.

A place where it’s nice and quiet

Unezhma is a fairy-tale name I heard a few years ago. The village, which is twenty kilometers away by a forest road to the White Sea a few inhabitants, real Pomors.

During those few years the village has died out. Once upon a time the village was big, rich, the men went to sea, the women made salt and fished for plaice along the banks. In Soviet times, in the 60s, the village was considered unpromising because of its location, and a program of resettlement of the inhabitants was adopted. But even though some people refused to move, the village is extinct. There is not a single inhabitant in the village, and it is no longer on the map, but Unezhma lives.

For the inhabitants of the station, the village has become something like a common dacha. Fishermen and hunters from the station live in the village in the summer and fall some houses are visited for the summer from Murmansk, Onega, St. Petersburg, New York, and Sydney. At the station, they always know exactly who is in the village now and for how long. There’s something about this place that attracts people. Some, having come once in their youth, have been coming for twenty years, dreaming of repairing their shabby houses, of staying for the winter, or maybe even for good. They say that of all the places on earth only there is good and peaceful.

When you get to the countryside from the station, it does seem like a surprisingly benign place.

The Station, on the other hand, is more like hell. This is the former free settlement. Everything is built in an unknown way, without a plan or order. There’s a sense that everyone who came was building what they wanted and how they wanted it, as if for one day.

There is no cell phone service at the station. There’s only one phone at the post office. In the evening, a “foundling” arrives at the next station, and in the morning, it seems one train passes by. By the evening commuter train, half of the station’s inhabitants come to the railroad – some to meet them, some to see them off..

There is nothing that contributes to any development of social life at the station, only a disco in the club.

The school is in a barrack, a former dormitory. Several students in each class. Two first-graders, one of whom is a repeat student. On the first of September, a ruler is held at the club. Half-darkened hall, mothers and grandmothers, teachers. The principal reads the order on admission to the first grade, followed by poorly memorized quatrains without expression. Not a single word, not a single smile. Exhaustion and despondency! At the end of the ruler’s assembly, first-graders receive pencil-cases and the American anthem. This school looks like not a school, but a camp, and I want to cry for the “bright” present and future of these children of a great country, looking at all that it was able to give them. At the same time, in a small house nearby, moonshine is being brewed. It is brewed by the grandfathers of these children..

Photography and the World

As time passes, you yourself change and maybe you start to shoot differently, or you start to doubt what you’re doing – either losing faith in yourself or wondering if it’s time to try something new, in or out of photography. I’ve been like that for a long time now. I ask myself: is photography for me a way to say something about the world around me and about myself, or has it become rather a limitation and a kind of barrier between me and the world around me, between me and my inner self?. This gesture, this almost unconditional reflex to hold a camera to your eye and photograph something, has become all too familiar. Sometimes I have the feeling that this is a kind of defense mechanism, a way of not thinking anymore, not analyzing any situation or trying to document it or talk about it, but just pushing a button and saying, “Okay, I’ve done all I can, I can move on.

In general, when I and many who started at the same time with me started shooting, I was very naive. I knew very little about photography. And now, when I know a dozen times more, I understand how ridiculous our attempts to take photographs imitating Cartier-Bresson, Rodchenko or any other classics were.

Right now – and for quite a while now – I’m looking for a publisher, and I hope that the tentative agreement that exists at the moment with a publishing house will enable me to publish my first book in the near future.

It seems to me that in contemporary photography I don’t think I have the right to judge and have sufficient knowledge, and to say “photography” is to say everything and nothing at the same time, because you have to attach at least one definition to that word – photography which? Roughly speaking, there are two main trends. One is so-called European photography the first thing that comes to mind is color photography shot on a square format . The other is the exact opposite of the first – the photo, imitating amateur and often shot with amateur cameras: it is direct or wants to seem direct and easy, there is no pursuit of quality and other attributes of professional photography. It seems that curators and photo editors are already so tired of the former in its extreme forms that they pounce on the latter with joy and excessive enthusiasm, actively exhibiting it in museums and publishing it.

Pushkin, in a letter to Vyazemsky, wrote: “Your poems … are too clever. And poetry, God forbid, must be silly.”. This is a quote that I often think of when I look at contemporary photography: images that are static, verified in every detail, cold to the point of impossibility, with text that just as clearly and in detail describes the whole project. It describes it so well that you begin to think maybe you shouldn’t have taken it, since the text explains it so exhaustively.

Fine art in general and photography as part of it and including contemporary art and contemporary photography is not a science after all, and photography as visual art should feed our eyes too, because “when the eye sees something it has never seen before, the heart feels something it has never felt before” I don’t know if Manuel Alvarez Bravo himself said that or just quoted someone .

I think sometimes we forget that photography is also a way to let someone live something and feel that it’s not just a well-written project and the images that illustrate it. There’s no reason to show how well you’re educated, how well you know art history, how well you can shoot, work with light and create sophisticated compositions, when photography becomes a kind of circus – “I can do this, and I’m even cooler”. Photography is also something else, something internal, which maybe turns out to be more important than everything else.

Today there are probably few people anymore who believe, both among the photographers themselves and among those who look at photography, that social photography can change the world. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be filmed and shown. You just have to figure out how to do it. Sometimes, as we know, a definite picture and a definite photographer can help at least one person he’s met and photographed, and this is no small thing.

Once an acquaintance from St. Petersburg, looking at my photographs from the village, said: “I never thought people could live like this in my country.”. Her reaction was for me proof that documentary, social photography should be filmed and shown.

2. Bullfighting in a village not far from Chile. Cuenca, Spain, 2007

3. The School for the Deaf. St. Petersburg, 2004

4. Home for the Elderly. Kingisepp, Leningrad region, 2004

5. Nursing Home. Kingisepp, Leningrad Oblast, 2004

6. Kastornoe, Kursk region, 2008

7. Vardzija, Georgia, 2007

8. Skachok and Misha. Shuvaevo, Tver region, 2007

9. Roma in the village of Nepovo, Leningrad oblast, 2006

10. Skachok. Shuvaevo, Tver region, 2007

11. Roma. Novosokolniki, Pskov region, 2006

12. Christina and Mischa. Shuvaevo, Tver region, 2007

13. Unezhma, Arkhangelsk region, 2007

14. Night Bus. Saint Petersburg, 2005

15. PENAL REHABILITATION INSTITUTE № 3. Petrodvorets, 2005

16. Theater “Ship of Fools”. Syros Island, Greece, 2008