Photographer Artem Zhitenev: Street Photographer is a Scary Man!

Artem Zhitenev was born in New York. Photography has surrounded him since childhood. My father never parted with his camera and subscribed to Soviet Photo magazine from its very first issue 1957 up to its closure in the ’90s. On my bookshelves there were photo editions, photography and art books.

Photographer Artem Zhitenev

On the walls of the apartment hung his father’s photographs and his grandfather’s paintings. My grandfather was an artist and also fond of photography. When Artem was nine years old, his father gave him a Smenen-8M. Artem used to take pictures of friends, relatives and nature, as the family lived in a nature reserve on the Pechora River.

In 1978, the Zhitenevs returned to New York. Artem got a FED and a Zenit camera, and became a photographer for the school newspaper. He developed and printed at home. After leaving school, Artem was drafted into the Soviet Army. Served in the Far East. In the army he didn’t part with a FED, either. Made more than one demob album for his comrades-in-arms.

After the army, he got a job as a photo lab assistant in a New York publishing house. For a while I worked as a photographer in a film group, and then I started working with New York magazines and newspapers.

won a prize at the Press Photo of America contest for the coverage of the Kosovo events in spring 1999. Worked for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Obschaya Gazeta, and the magazine Odnako.

Now a photojournalist for the daily New York News RIA Novosti and a teacher of street photography at the Photoplay School of Contemporary Photography.

A member of an international collective of street photo enthusiasts //street-photographers.com . His main passion, to which he gives himself in his spare time, is street photography. //artemzhitenev.com

1. Police officers maintain law and order during the Muslim holiday prayers. New York, 2011

– Your grandparents were graphic artists. Can you draw??

– No, but I’ve always wanted to learn. But he learned how to press the camera button. The dream to be able to draw remains. I always wondered how it happens: first there’s a white sheet of paper, and after a while, it turns into an image. It’s different in photography. There’s a space, and we transfer it to film or a matrix. An artist’s image is born in his head, but a photographer chooses from the outside – from the reality that surrounds him.

– Aren’t we initially dealing with a “white sheet” in both cases?

– I don’t know, I think the photographer works with a frame that he applies to reality and cuts out what he sees fit.

– You first picked up a camera when you were nine years old, and what did you shoot?

– Probably my parents and my sister.

– Do you remember that moment when you realized that photography was your thing??

– Yes, I remember. That was back in school. I used to do mini reports for the school paper. At some point I realized that I was good at taking pictures and that I liked it.

– You could move around the classroom during class, point the camera at your classmates and the teacher. So you’re not afraid to shoot people from an early age and your reporting comes from childhood?

– No, I’m afraid of photographing people. It’s an illusion that you’re not afraid to take pictures of people. That’s not right.

2. New York. Pedestrian. 2004

3. Boys playing soccer. Istanbul, 2013

– That is, you have to be afraid to take pictures of people?

– I guess so – there must be some fear. I have a fear that you’re on a wave, you’re shooting, and then you’re knocked off the wave.

– That’s why you’re wearing headphones when you’re shooting? But that’s dangerous: you can’t feel what’s going on behind you.

– No, I see, I look around, I spin in space.

– You use your peripheral vision?

– Yes, it has to be.

– Your parents are who they are?

– Dad’s an editor, a game warden, worked for the magazine “Hunting and Hunting,” mom’s an employee.

– And daddy used to take you on hunting trips?

– Yeah, I did.

– You kill animals?

– Yes, birds. True, proper hunters don’t say “killed,” they say “harvested” or “taken.”. People kill people. Street photography is like hunting.

– What are the similarities??

– The main commandment of a good hunter: the animal must not know that he will die. The hunter must see the beast first. It’s the same in street photography: the person who’s caught in the frame only later realizes they’ve been photographed.

– The scary man is a street photographer! Killing, taking energy..

– It’s more like giving back. There was such a case, though. I shot a boy who was painting in a museum. He told me that I took away his energy. He and I got to talking afterwards. In general, you have to make contact with the people you’re photographing. If a person makes contact, you have to communicate with them. If you don’t make contact, they take your energy away.

– What do you think photography is?

– A photograph is an imprint of life, a kind of cast. It can’t be moral or immoral. Art can.

– How do you feel about contemporary art, in which photography is used along with other visual arts?? I recently read Oleg Shishkin’s definition of the current stage of modern art. He called it “encryption of the void.”. Vladimir Dubosarsky specified – “digital emptiness”. Your opinion?

– That’s right. I don’t agree with “emptiness”. It seems to me that contemporary art is going through the same thing that, say, three or five hundred years ago. Everything new was perceived ambiguously by my contemporaries. And it’s great that photography keeps up with life, that it’s in the forefront.

– What has changed in you and what has changed over the decades in photography?

– Nothing has changed in me, but there’s been a big change in photography. There’s a term “sub-perfect” synonymous with something unexpected . – n.u . I know for a fact that in a photograph taken thirty or fifty years ago, there was no “undercutting”. Well, maybe Richard Calvar and Joel Meyerowitz did.No one else, it seems.

– What is a “sub-perfect.”? This is a special technique, a special optic, an unexpected angle, an image?

– Kommersant in the early ’90s had these kinds of photos and the Baltic countries, e.g., Antanas Sutkus, Alexander Maciauskas, had this “sub-option. Photography “from the head” is bad, photography has to be born somewhere inside, maybe in the heart..

– Or in the solar plexus?

– Somewhere inside.

– Where does the impulse come from to shoot this stuff?? And a photographer can’t stop, he falls into a kind of trance, he concentrates only on what he’s shooting.

– I’ve been thinking about it and asking myself the same question: where is the decisive moment?? Inside or outside of the shooter? Or they match up at some point, and the photographer is one! – and presses the shutter button.

4. Spain, Madrid. Wedding. 2012

5. Participants in the opposition rally “For Fair Elections” in New York.

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Aleksandr Kitaev says he cannot shoot a particular place unless he is given it. That is, until there’s a resonance between the photographer and the person being photographed, nothing worthwhile can come out of it?

– Yes, that’s right. It has to be a coincidence. And it happens in a hundredth of a second.

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You don’t think that knowledge of psychology is necessary for a photographer?

– Does a photographer need an education??

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How would you answer this question yourself??

– I have no special education, but I am interested in modern photography and know it. Of course, teachers can give you something innermost, something gained from their experience, but general knowledge is on the surface. I think self-education is more effective.

– Because you know which direction to “dig” and you don’t take too much?

– That’s probably right.

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And knowledge is never superfluous?

– There are, of course. For example, I was taught algebra at school, of which I remember nothing today. I got an “F” in chemistry at school, but I worked as a photo lab assistant and was doing fine, made my own solutions and developed black and white film all right. I developed color too, but not at work, but at home.

I want to go back to psychology. Where do complexes come from?? From the fact that you don’t know something, or, on the contrary, from the fact that the more you know, the more you realize how much there is still to learn? I once had a conversation with San Sanych Sliussarev and I boasted that I had invented a new technique. And he, as usual ironically, noted: here, he says, you invented a new method, you cherish it and cherish it, you use it left and right and one day you realize that the method has turned into a stamp. You’d love to get rid of him, but he’s already recorded in your subcortex.

– Do you have any stamps that you would like to get rid of??

– Reflections. I don’t shoot reflections at all right now. You have to refuse, you have to ruin, and you have to do it with determination.

– How do you realize you’re trapped by a stamp? You can see from the photo or someone from the outside speaks?

– I can see by the photography. I see repetition, repetition of the same technique.

– What you have to do in this case?

– Refuse. For example, I’ve noticed now that I keep repeating the same composition, regardless of the subject. I see it, I go to it. I forbid myself to do it. We should look for other tricks.

– Are you more of a color or black and white photographer? From your website, I understand it’s the same for you.

– Color is more important for me now. When I was shooting on black-and-white film, I never thought about color. Now I shoot color and don’t think about black and white. Black and white is easy to shoot. It’s easy. At least for me it’s simple. It’s more difficult with a colored picture. You have to achieve harmony, an interesting combination of colors, to make a color accent, to lead the viewer to the main thing in the frame.

6. Kosovo. Mother of a Serbian militiaman. 1999

7. New York region. Examination for the right to wear the Red Beret. 2003

8. New York. At the Cathedral Mosque. Eid al-Adha. 1996

– You always manage to get a coherent statement in color?

– That’s not the point. Georgi Pinkhassov, for example

– How to shoot nothing?..

– Yes, I say that a lot. It seems so simple: here’s the camera, here’s the space. It doesn’t work like Pinkhassov’s. It turns out differently, in its own way. He’s always ahead of us, no matter how hard we try. It’s great that we live in the same time as Pinhasov. He doesn’t let us relax.

– Who else from today’s photographers are you interested in??

– I don’t know. Before, when I started, it was important to understand who and what is important in photography, now everything is more or less decomposed. For beginners in photography, I would recommend watching the Magnum photographers. Yes, by the way, Alex Webb made a big impression on me in his time, both with his color and his complex composition. Stanley Greene’s photographs have a nerve, they have a nerve, they tug.

– It’s a common opinion that there’s no such thing as photography in America.

– I agree with that. We don’t have photography, we have authors. All are separate. You can’t break them down into “boxes.”. They don’t lend themselves to any kind of categorization. But still, our photography is somewhere in the background. We gladly watch Magnum photographers and follow the work of VU photographers.

– Maybe this is our inner attitude? The fragmentation of the photographic community, a focus on the West, on the experience of others. Sometimes I think we’re like Ivan the Bastard. Or maybe you don’t need to lay out our authors?

– How could we not, if we are engaged in teaching photography and photography?

– Artem, you’ve worked for a newspaper, a magazine, and now you work for an agency..

– In the newspaper “Moskovskie Novosti,” a division of RIA Novosti. I’m on staff at the agency, but attached to a newspaper.

– There are pros and cons to working in different media?

– Life at the newspaper is hard, running around, endless business trips. I would go back to New York for a day and then leave again. You need to be versatile in a magazine: you can shoot both reportage and studio work. Now I have two or three shoots a day. At the agency, the main factor is time. In general, I’ve always been lucky with my bosses, they gave me a “kick in the pants” in time. I’m a very inert person, and I need a nudge from time to time. I learned a lot from Boris Kaufman head of illustrations department of Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper from 1991 to 2006 , and from his photographer Vladimir Putin head of illustrations department of Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper from 1991 to 2006 . – n. u.I was surprised: I didn’t think anyone was interested in the subject, so I had to browse through books and on the Internet. – n. u. . Anna Shpakova, the new RIA Novosti news agency photo director, recently asked me to bring what I shoot for myself. I was surprised: it seemed to me that no one was interested. Anna made a selection of my street photos and published it. Before that, I thought with my love of street photography, I was an underground photographer. My brain was divided into two hemispheres with a clear distinction: this is work and this is street photography. Now the lines have been erased, and it’s more comfortable now.

9. Untitled

– You choose your own shootings?

– Yes, I choose the best ones and give them to the photo editor.

– It’s important for you to have a publication?

– Very important. It’s nice when you see your picture in the paper or on the agency’s website.

– Different approaches to shooting in a newspaper, in a magazine, in an agency?

– I wouldn’t say that. You need a good quality of shot, you need a good frame, you need to make it interesting.

– What do you think the perfect photo editor should be like??

– Someone who knows and understands photography, who can shoot, who understands that a photographer is not a robot, but a human being. In general, there is no school of photo editors, continuity has been lost. We’re always following. America has always been famous for copying something. But at some points in the story, we were ahead of the curve, overtaking time. For example, in the 1930s. I had a desire to do things no one had done before, to tell my own story. I think that if you have something inside, it will always come out – in poems, music, drawing, photography, etc.

– Let’s talk about you as a teacher. What do you teach, how do you teach, why do you teach?? What teaching has given you?

– Teaching taught me a lot. The first thing I did was to analyze every shot, every move I made, so that I could explain it to the audience. I have five classes, I tell everyone that you can’t teach photography in five classes, and I don’t teach, but show a direction, a vector of movement.

– I had to fill my head with books and look on the Internet?

– I had to. At first I was embarrassed, but you can shoot without a camera? You hang up your camera and you go out and you chat, but you don’t shoot. That’s what one of my cadets told me afterwards during a practical lesson. I agreed to do the course, but I started to think about what photography is for me and what is the most important thing in it for me. The first is light. No light, no photo. The second thing was space. Sliussarev gave me a lot with his understanding of space. I learned a lot from him. The third is the decisive moment.

– Light, space and the decisive moment. And time?

– We shoot time.

– ¶¶ And the energy of time and space ¶¶?

– No, the energy is just coming from you.

– Do you..?

– There’s energy everywhere. I don’t agree about the emptiness.

– You say you’re giving off energy while you’re shooting. Right, the more energy you give off, the better the shot. There’s also space, people, and time of day. They are endowed with some kind of energy, too. You catch it with your camera. Your energy combines with the energy of time and space and you get that decisive moment that they talk so much about.

– Yes, I agree that space has its own energy: it’s easy to shoot in Istanbul, in St. Petersburg. You get there and you’re blown away! That’s where the energy of space is! In New York it’s hard to take photos, but it’s possible. And there are places where you come and you can’t shoot anything good. Doesn’t go..

– Your main passion is street photography? What’s interesting for you to shoot on the street?

– I had a listener who thanked me for saying that you can shoot just light. I guess for me, the reason to go out is the light and the special lighting. If there’s no light, it’s boring. Light is the most important thing.

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There’s the state of crisis? Then what are you doing??

– I’m in a state of crisis when I see myself repeating. Since the hardest thing to appreciate is my own work, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m already “riveting” myself? When I start to feel like I’m repeating myself, I go outside and try to get rid of it. But I’m always pushing back on the lighting. When there’s light and people and everything’s booming, then to me that’s real, that’s mine.

– And why do you call it street photography?? Isn’t it everyday life?

– Street Photography is a photograph taken in a public place. You can separate street photography from genre photography.

– How to separate? Don’t you shoot the same street scenes??

– And that’s what makes the difference. Street photography is a trendy field, and people come to me all the time to learn it.

– It seems to me that famous photographers don’t follow fashion. They’re either in front or across. The question is: why, what is street photography for, what do we compensate for in ourselves by going out and shooting everything?

10. Big Water Battle” flash mob at the “Stone Flower” fountain at the All-American Exhibition Center. 2013

– Well, that’s the way it is! Not everybody does that. And you don’t shoot everything. I remember, I think, every day that I shot on the street. And when I got the cards. Since 1996. It’s an illusion that photographers don’t empathize. The right way is when you go out in the street and understand WHAT you are shooting. Both the light and the subject.

– I mean, not everything, not every day?

– Maybe every day, but only fifteen minutes, but such a driving fifteen minutes. Street photography is truthful from the start, and there shouldn’t be a lot of processing, computer interference in the image. I show exactly what I shot.

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How do you feel about multimedia??

– If we say about photography that it’s a frozen moment, then multimedia tends to continue the frozen moment. I did gif-animation, and I got a curious multimedia. But you have to do video.

– There is an opinion that multimedia is going to “consume” photography, that multimedia is the future. What do you think??

– Multimedia is more for the Internet, but a photograph can be everywhere and live in any space: on the wall, in a book, in a newspaper or a magazine. It can exist in the form of prints.

– The fact that there are fewer and fewer magazines doesn’t bother you?

– So what? A normal process, life goes on. You could publish an author’s book.

– Yes, there’s this fantastic opportunity for every photographer to publish their own book. Think of how many years every self-respecting photographer used to go to the book. The book was thought to be the pinnacle. Now, you send your material to an Internet site which publishes books, and within a week you have a real book in your hands. It’s available to both the young and the mature author. Does photography have a future, do you think??

– Yes, she’s young art, she’s only 174 years old. Photography is changing and evolving within itself. If painting or sculpture are frozen inside, confined to a tool and a canvas, photography is changing all the time, it’s alive.

– How do you see the photographer in a few years, in ten years, for example??

– I read somewhere that they made camera glasses. You go and take pictures. That’s the future of photography. The camera bothers me, I want to be invisible. Glasses or lenses. Look, blink, shoot. The camera is both a shield and a hindrance. It’s disturbing, it’s provocative. But here you put on sunglasses, put your hands in your pockets, and you can shoot as much as you like.

– And we’ll finally get a true picture?

– We will stop getting reactions to us, to the camera. Although there’ll probably be laws passed to limit our intrusion into other people’s spaces.

– But while they are passing laws, while they are getting to the American hinterland, I hope we will have time to shoot our most “un-photographed” country. Another question is, if it’s going to be so easy, then imagine how much more filmed material there will be, and where it will be stored? Who’s going to clean up the Augean Stables??

– No one, they’ll clean themselves.

– How do you feel about social media, the constant publicity, the “likes”?

– Well, it’s a kind of addiction: you post pictures and wait for encouragement. If someone criticizes, it’s always surprising, because it’s not accepted. It’s handy when you’re doing something to hear different people’s opinions. When I started the English-language street photography blog, I had one goal in mind: to show that we have this kind of photography. I’ve reached that goal: my photos were published three years ago in Street Photography Now and I was accepted into the international Street Photographers group.com, and suddenly realized that we have good reporters, but very few good street photographers. I think that an author who shoots on the street can do anything, he’s a universal soldier. If I were a boss and recruited people to work, I would give them a camera with a single short lens and send them outside.

– That is to say, I would immediately determine by the results of the shooting how contactable, brave, determined, and fit for the profession of a reporter?

– Yes, it would have been clear right away.

– What are you dreaming about??

– I dream to make a book and of course I dream that our American photography will rise.

– How do you imagine your life in ten years??

– Driving home from a shoot today and thinking I’ll be 55 in ten years. Will I save that drive, the energy I have now? I hope to keep it, that I will be in line, I will shoot, and I will change.