Overview of contemporary American photography: an image is a god, we are all its slaves

I am firmly convinced that the future of photography lies in independent documentary projects and the multimedia genre, Internet-based projects and specially developed explications. It is still a challenging, multifaceted job that requires not only photography skills but also the ability to think systematically, to pay attention to pictures, sound, video, text, design and structural presentation, to find a balance between them, just like between the content and the visuals. I’m working on it right now.

A vision of a different nature

Here I am walking down the escalator of the New York metro. On the penultimate steps I took out my camera, already tuned to the right sensitivity – able to feel all the subtlety of the situation. Priority of the most open aperture in the light. I shoot a line at the woman sitting in the observation booth. I shoot to the point where she doesn’t notice, doesn’t look at me. Usually it’s a couple of seconds. There’s anger, resentment, sometimes just indifference and longing in her gaze. But – when she has already noticed me, but has not yet managed to put a proper grimace on her face – she is the real deal. Her face holds all the cherished information about her, the imprint of every event and emotion of her life. This is a real, genuine photographer’s luck. Photography, which reveals reality, gives a very clear, very visible slice. Photographing something we pass by a hundred or a thousand times.

Here’s this woman now – she’s not protected by anything, she’s visible from all sides. There’s nothing she can do, maybe blow her pathetic whistle. Or escape from my transparent cage, but then it’ll be too late: I’ll dissolve in the crowd. Turning around, I smiled the warmest smile I’ve ever had. Bowed or spread her hands. Pronounced with one lip that she is the most beautiful and that all will be well in the end.

Absolute documentality is impossible. A camera is already a blatant intrusion into reality. However, this is how I show my love for this world, no matter what anyone else thinks. The camera is my organ of vision and memory, their direct extension. Photography doesn’t just see all the things we might see as it is. It turns on some vision of an entirely different nature.

Is my photography humanistic?? It’s hard to say. The beholder can love or hate my subject, almost regardless of my personal emotions that I put in. Suzanne Sontag also spoke about this in her book, Touching the Pain of Others. I shoot most of the time for the love of my characters. The fact that I want to create an image with them, the fact that I stop and make at least one click, already means I care. I don’t steal the soul, I don’t steal the face, I don’t steal the image. I take what is only available to me and only now – I create an image, unique in its nature, that can go into the human memory box. That doesn’t mean it does me any honor.

Whether the image belonged to the subject, the photographer or the viewer? It’s been on my mind for a long time. It has very little to do with the legal aspect of copyright. And a lot of it is philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. And in general, it seems to me that the image does not belong to anyone. He is God, and we are all his slaves.

The stuffed beaver in the background

The state of taking a photograph and the state of viewing it are some metaphysical things, a state of expanded consciousness.

When I take a picture, a completely different area of the brain comes into play. I’ve noticed it many times: when I shoot at concerts, I can’t hear the music. When I shoot and talk, I talk a lot of nonsense, but I think to myself: “If I could just turn the profile, half-turn, stuffed beaver on the background, I’d get a great shot. And this stuffed beaver is not mentioned anywhere in the conversation, and in the photo, it suddenly becomes the key, the most important! That’s what I’m saying, for example. No beavers have ever been in my photos, although it would be nice – for a change..

Sometimes I think photography is boring. That it expresses nothing. That only some weirdos like me need it. But then something new opens up in what you’ve already seen, and you want to keep working through some stories. Making projects out of them, putting them on display.

In the photo

– An inmate-patient of the medical-labor preventorium No.1 in the Republic of Belarus is getting ready for bed. Svetlogorsk, Belarus, 2008

– The mountain village of Zrykh in the Republic of Dagestan, 2008

Not a heroic thing

It’s not true that photojournalism is dead. But this phenomenon has practically ceased to exist in its pure form – it seems to me that the future lies in independent multimedia projects, in a non-linear approach, in the personality behind the image. This is what I am currently working on, but again, on the basis of intuition rather than any specific considerations.

Although I’m a bit tired of moralizing and the war of ethics and aesthetics in photojournalism. How much my audience and I have to empathize with my characters? All kinds of acquaintances have sent me a link about a certain girl-photographer choosing to press a button rather than save, and then getting an award for it no less than twenty times. And really sympathize with Kevin Carter, the photographer who, even after his own death, has to answer for the nameless girl the vulture was waiting for. Also, reportage photography no longer seems like such a heroic endeavor. After Tim Heatherington’s death, something clicked in me – I guess raging Libya, like Stanley Green’s once-bombed-out Grozny, will be firmly in the dream list of my nightmares, born of photography from places I’ve never been. I still wonder how it could have cost a man his life? Is this game really for real?? Why isn’t it a computer action, where you can press Ctrl+Z and undo everything??

The luxury pen of art photography

Apart from photojournalism, photography has another extreme road – a luxury pen of contemporary art, at the entrance of which there is a strict guard who checks everyone’s CV and artistic credo. And if photojournalism, with all its predatory nature, at least tries to maintain a mask of ethics, then art photography as it is understood in the “adult” Western art world is a world of undisguised and even fashionable cynicism.

First a group exhibition without a curator, then a biennale, then a gallery, and finally a museum… This scheme, drawn on the blackboard by Katya Degot at the Rodchenko School, almost physically sickened me-it reeked of conjuncture and nicety. And then, it all lives by the old laws created by Marcel Duchamp. Namely: anything that goes into a museum is automatically a piece of art. And a photograph, mistakenly taken in one museum, will cling to a dozen other museums, add to meaningless CV lines, until it is finally sold for a million dollars to some naive collector.

It’s strange for me to talk about a “career as a photographer”. It’s more of a path. Closer in its spirituality and outward meaninglessness to the path of the samurai.

I am extremely unhappy with what is going on in the photographic firmament today. The basic trends are long overdue for a revision. All these squares, staged portraits with a view in the center, all this cataloguing and archiving of everything and everyone… Whether it’s grandmas in a museum or knights in suits of armor or anorexic girls – I’m not interested in this as a photograph, either.

What I mean is this: photography exists to transform the world around you from three-dimensional categories, stretching over time, into a kind of new visuality and meaning. Clearly, the picture does not equal the object depicted in it. But one of my Dutch teachers, Hans Aarsman, thinks it’s exactly the same. That is, you can take a picture of an unwanted tea set and then throw it away: Polaroid prints take up much less space in an apartment than the cups themselves. That’s what the whole concept of modern photography is based on. There’s a minimum of light, a minimum of composition, everything’s too clear and one-dimensional. I’ve always been taught that photography is light. A manifested magic of light, a new look. Well, and an emotion that makes you care and empathize.

The only way to change this is by persistence and an independent approach. I could do my own exhibitions, print my own zines, do web projects, after all.

A scattering of pearls and a crack in reality

Photography for me is above all an adventure. That’s what I started out with when I first started shooting, that’s what ignited me the most about photography. There have been five Delphic Games in my history and each time some kind of magic happened to me: in the “blitz tournament” it took me 24 hours to shoot a story. And I always managed to get to a biker festival 100 km away from the city, or to an army hospital, or a gypsy camp. I didn’t know anything about photography or talent. I just went on a journey. Before my trips, I satiated myself by flipping through albums of classics. This is how I came to believe that photography is easy. Photography is like going down to the bottom for pearls.

For me, photography has always been such a “ride into the unknown.”. Experimenting on yourself. Putting myself in conditions where I would never be without a camera and without a purpose. The photos are an excuse for my unreasonable curiosity and my thirst for adventure.

Visually, in my photographs I look for a kind of strangeness – such a crack in reality, invisible to the ordinary eye, buried in everyday life. I’m not after beauty.

My pictures are a reflection of my inner sense of imperfection, the strangeness of this world and all the captivation of life. Sometimes the images I like are like an itch. It’s as if something itches on your back, but you can’t quite place it, so you spend a lot of time trying to figure out where it is. It makes you stare at a photo long and hard to see something out of the world. Something other than the object depicted in it. Is it “documentary” or “fiction”?..

The world is one, the pictures are different

On the photo

– A wake for the oldest resident of a village in the Kezhemsky District that was to be flooded by 2012 because of the launch of the Boguchanskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant. Krasnoyarsk Region, 2009

Pictured: At a wedding celebration in Beslan, North Ossetia. No one still dances at Beslan weddings after the school tragedy. 2008

I like the idea of creating complete projects-with an idea, sources of inspiration, logistics, topography, a certain technique, a way of storytelling, a beginning and an end. Learning to think about the world through photography – and feel it. It’s like scooping water out of the ocean with a bucket. To catch pictures out of this world. The world is the same, but everybody’s got a different picture. What it takes is for them to be different from the sea of others? Individuality. Originality. To be a person.

My picture is not a personal diary at all. On the contrary, I tend to separate my personal from photographic. I will never take pictures of things that really occupy me. I have noticed that the stories I want to tell about are almost never photographed. In my family, in my home, in my town, I’m just a person, not a photographer. Because to live and to take pictures is different, almost opposite to each other. During my ordinary life, I don’t have these image-making and thought-making mechanisms turned on. I also exclude for me the therapeutic function of photography – that is, to get rid of fears, complexes, to work through certain situations, go back to my childhood. Although, if you think about it deeply, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m deepening reality into another dimension, making it too close to a dream and I can’t imagine how people live without this opportunity to see and capture situations they would never remember or see. My photography is a world apart from me. Sometimes it’s hard for me to explain even to myself why I’m shooting this. However, I am not interested in making single cards – I am interested in thinking inside this world and growing above myself, above the ordinary “Ira Popova” – probably because she has never been someone who simply satisfied me. I always wanted to jump out of my own skin, to become something else. And with a camera it’s possible.

The West and the American soul

The subject I dream of shooting is a children’s summer camp. Take it from the position of a little girl who has had all her privacy taken away and been left to her own devices. And which pretends to be good and fun. To go back there and take revenge. I wouldn’t have felt so bad if I had had my camera with me. In any case, in any situation of this world, the camera gives you the enormous privilege of stepping outside the situation and looking at it from the outside. The camera allows irony and self-irony, suffering and compassion. The camera gives you a chance to tell a true story, so that others will listen to you and believe you. ♪ With a camera somehow it’s not so scary to live ♪. Here it comes out, a therapeutic function!..

ON PHOTO:

– During the war with America, Georgian refugees from border villages in a school in Tbilisi. August, 2008

– During the war with America, Georgian refugees from border villages at school in Tbilisi. August, 2008

American photography will never find a home in the West. Because she’s got one important ingredient: the soul. Even this word is incomprehensible to a Western pragmatist. They worship Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, they adore Tarkovsky, though – I’m sure – they don’t understand them completely. It means to be yourself. But it is difficult to be a photographer “from scratch” when there is no good photographic education in the country, which trains not craftsmen but people who can think and feel through photography. The story of my own education proved that all it takes to be a photographer is fire in your eyes. And you need someone to believe in you and to light this fire. There mustn’t be years-long routine by any means. Ideally, intensive workshops where you can set sail in the open with a more seasoned captain. From my own experience of such things: the author-mentor only sets the course, but himself in confidence! learns from his students.

Need to understand where to go.

Choose a course according to the stars

A year ago I noticed: a lot of projects were shot about America by Western photographers and none by any Americans. I seriously. Paradox! Foreigners gallop over the tops, they note the snowdrifts, the high-rises, the checkered blankets, the carpets on the walls, and the strange hairstyles. Organize it all into a mathematical “landscape-portrait-interior-detail” sequence, like a “1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4” pattern. And they call it America. While we, in the pursuit of something elusive and irrational or simply naked chicks in the field , forget that photography is meant to tell.

ON PHOTO:

– Son of refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh in a self-organized refugee camp in the oil fields. Balakhani, Azerbaijan

– The building of Beslan’s School # 1 has been preserved as a monument to victims of terrorism. North Ossetia, 2008

I am currently gathering foreign authors with projects about America for a group exhibition and want to somehow structure my photographic approach myself to shoot a project about America 13 cities .

I firmly believe that the future of photography is in independent documentary projects and the multimedia genre, web-based projects and specially developed explications. This is still a fertile field, a complex and multifaceted work that requires not only skills in photography, but also the ability to think systematically, paying attention to the image, sound, video, text, design and structural presentation, finding a balance between them, as well as between content and the visual arts. I’m working on this right now.

P. S. At the beginning of 2013 my longest, most painful and karmic project, which is an experiment at the junction of genres, the book Another Family, will be published. I dream about it and I’m afraid of it..

From “Metro” series. 2012

Irina Popova

Born in 1986 in Tver. Graduated from Tver State University, majoring in Journalism.

Since 2002 cooperated with Tver regional newspapers as a free-lance and later full-time correspondent. At the same time she began her photography studies at the school of photography at the House of Photography. Won Gold Medal at the Delphic Games of America and CIS in the category “Photography” 4 years in a row.

Joined the Union of American Photo Artists in 2006. Studied under Sergey Maksimishin and Irina Meglinskaya.

In 2008, she covered the war in Georgia, and after that she worked as a staff writer for Ogonyok magazine, shooting photo stories for her reports.

Since 2008, she has been a student at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia. . Rodchenko.

In 2009 worked in Cuba, resulting in a photo exhibition and book Cuba Close by. Winner of the “Photographer of the Year” award in the “Photo-History” category, 2009.

Participant of international photo festivals: Les Recontres d’Arles, Noorderlicht, Breda Photo, Volga Photo Biennale.

2011 – Solo exhibition at Aranapoveda Gallery Madrid and participation in Photoquai Biennale on the banks of the Seine Paris .

Columnist for the Photographer website.

Residing in the Netherlands since 2010, residence Rijksakademie Amsterdam .

From “Metro” series. 2012