Photographer Maria Pleshkova: Self-portrait in ivory tower

History is gradually speeding up now it has reached an unbelievably quick pace: it counts in days, sometimes in hours, even in minutes. Every day is a tangle of events, from microscopic to global. At the same time the modern world is segmented. And everything that happens within each segment is, as a rule, only of interest to the direct participants of the events. The same is true for photography. More and more often it seems that photography exists for its own sake, and photographers are more and more closed in their ivory tower. A person far from photographic life will be alien to both the aesthetics of contemporary art photography and the sometimes too harsh themes of photojournalism. Opinions of people who are not involved in the photographic process vary from “well, what’s so special about it??” to “the horror of why this should be filmed at all?”.

Self-portrait. 2012 g.

Maria Pleshkova – documentary photographer. Born in New York in 1986.

Education

2012 – XXV Barnstorm: the Eddie Adams Workshop, Jeffersonville, New York.

2010-2011 – Tatiana Danilyants, “Creating Short Film: Theory and Practice”, School of Visual Arts.

2010 – Sergey Maksimishin’s “Photojournalism” course. Magazine photo. Photohistory,” School of Visual Arts.

2009-2010 – “Photojournalism” professional retraining program, Lomonosov New York State University. m. v. Lomonosov.

2003-2008 – Faculty of Law, Lomonosov New York State University, America. m. v. Lomonosova.

Exhibitions and Festivals

2013 – Festival Circulation s : Young European Photography Paris, France

2012 – group exhibition “Young Photography 2012 2/2. Reality/Decoration” St. Petersburg, FotoDepartament .

2012 – International New York Festival Femme Fest: group exhibition “A World without Women” New York, ArtPlay Design Center .

2012 – Photography Open Salon Arles Arles, France .

2012 – Group Exhibition “Young Photographers of America 2012” Cheboksary .

2012 – Group Exhibition “Fotoboloto and Fotosugar. CHURCHES OF A CHURCHED COUNTRY. Winter of the Twelfth Year” New York, the A.S. Pushkin Center of Photography . Lumière brothers .

2011 – Seville European Film Festival Seville, Spain .

2011 – International Exhibition of Young Art “Workshop 20’11. Today/Tomorrow”: “Art Haus in Short Film” program, curator Tatyana Danilyants New York, New York Museum of Modern Art .

2011 – group exhibition “Young Photographers of America 2011” Kazan .

2011 – Group exhibition of Vyatkin’s students “Blicks of the Master” New York, Photocenter of Journalists Union .

Awards

2012 International Photography Awards: Honorable Mention.

2012 The Inge Morath Award: Finalist.

2012 Young Photographers of America: Winner.

2012 China International Press Photo Contest: Gold Prize – Nature & Environment News Stories.

2012 China International Press Photo Contest: Bronze prize – Art Culture & Entertainment News Stories.

A man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask during an unsanctioned action outside the Ostankino TV center. 2012

But to say that photography exists on its own would not be quite right. I am rather speaking about photography as a part of contemporary art which is characterized by the universal blurring of borders, both geographical and genre-based. In the era of globalization, the information and cultural space is becoming more or less unified, although, of course, every region remains unique: European contemporary art will be different from Asian art.

And within a particular region: Spanish photography will be somewhat different than, for example, Norwegian. The blurring of the boundary between the arts, or rather the blending of everything with everything else, is also taking place. Photo co-exists with audio and video in one audiovisual work, painting and photographic techniques co-exist on one canvas, the image is connected with the text.

Not only does symbiosis produce new meanings, but also new genres, such as multimedia, which combines various media and is based on the laws of drama. And this is just one example. Other art also permeates each other. I dare not predict what the result will be. I want to believe that something new will happen in art, that it won’t become a thing in itself and we won’t witness a game of beads, like it was in Hermann Hesse’s novel.

From “Days of War: An Intimate Diary” project.

Bringing your own image to life

Photography is not, and has never been, objective. For me, another criterion is much more important. There are “live” and “not live” photos. Everything seems to be good in the “undead”: light, color, composition, and subject. But the picture looks dead, does not catch the eye, does not make the viewer gasp and is forgotten immediately after viewing. “Living,” on the other hand, may not be perfect in terms of technique and composition, but they keep the viewer in suspense, provide food for the mind and the heart.

For me, this is photographic truth. How much is the frame felt?? On the one hand, there is the energy from outside, the sympathy, the empathy. You become the subject of your own shooting, you live someone else’s life, and for a moment become someone else. There is self-denial and knowledge of the world. And it doesn’t depend on what you shoot: meetings in New York, floods in Krymsk, everyday life in the American countryside, your own self-portraits.

On the other hand, you put yourself into the frame. And in a way every frame is a self-portrait. The symbiosis of the exterior and interior creates a vivid image frame, which you look at and sometimes cannot understand what the magic is in it. The magic is that behind the curtain of the visible appears the very essence of the situation. In other words, things in these images become ideas of things, according to Aristotle.

A man wearing a Vladimir Putin mask during a rally on Sakharov Avenue. 2011

Space in a cocoon

Technology, including photographic equipment, is developing rapidly, each year more and more rapidly. It took mankind centuries to get the first photograph, decades to design the digital camera. Nowadays, novelties appear every year… and are surprising less and less.

A man is tired of the constantly changing world around him and withdraws into himself, away from the global world crisis. This concerns the economic crisis, uncertainty about one’s future, the cultural crisis, the accelerating pace of life every year and the avalanche-like flow of information. A person goes into his inner “cocoon”, he becomes interested in his own inner space.

Modern photography is also interested in the human being’s inner world. Photographers’ gaze is more and more often focused not on the outer world but on the inner world. It is not distant countries with their exoticism or hot events that are explored, but the microcosm of man. Add to that the fact that blogs and social networks are gradually blurring the line between the intimate and the public, accustoming people to the fact that personal things can become public.

Photography is documentary in the nature of capturing reality. It would seem, where does psychologism come from?? But it does. And feelings, fears, thoughts are portrayed in the frame. Projects come out in different forms: some people take pictures of their families and close ones, some people are into self-portraits, and some people focus on their inner world. Everyone has a different goal. For someone it is a story about a global problem, using the example of his or her immediate environment for someone it is self-discovery thanks to photography, and for someone it is healing and art therapy.

Participants in Bolotnaya Square rally. 2011

Photographer Angelo Meredino tells the story of his wife battling breast cancer. He married the girl of his dreams, but six months after the wedding she was diagnosed with cancer. For four years Angelo has been helping his wife and documenting her struggle with the disease. Giovanni Cocco tells the story of his sister Monia, disabled since birth. Both stories are poignant.

The level of trust between the photographer and the model plays a significant role. It’s one thing for a photographer to appear out of nowhere. And it is quite different when a photographer is your closest person. Of course, talented photographers can find an approach to almost any person, make friends, get a feel for their model. But if you’ve been living with a person for years, the level of empathy will be many times higher.

I don’t mean to say that photographing loved ones is easy. No. Sometimes you know your model so well – every gesture, nuance of the mood – that you do not understand which side to approach. And then there’s responsibility. You feel responsibility towards everyone you shoot, no matter if he is a close relative or a person you see for the first time. His image remains in your photographs. The way you saw and photographed him, the world will see and remember him like that. In front of people you feel responsibility doubly: they trust you a priori. Stories like these are not just stories about people struggling with the disease. They also touch upon photographers themselves, who help and take part in this struggle.

Another category of personal stories are self-portraits. Self-portrait genre has existed for a long time and occupies a special place in art. A self-portrait can have many purposes. On the one hand, it is self-discovery, self-understanding, self-reflection on one’s own character, strengths and weaknesses, self-reflection on one’s own appearance. At the moment of making a self-portrait, the artist is answering the questions “who am I??”, “what I am like?”. The other side of the genre is self-positioning. Self-portraits are far from reality, and they don’t portray the person they really are, but the way they want to be or appear in the eyes of others.

And the genre, which seems to me the most interesting and difficult to implement, is the photography of the invisible, such as internal states. How to tell about fear, about passion, about melancholy? They are invisible, they are inside us. A photograph is not a man-made thing, you can’t make it up and pick out a color, mix colors, or depict an abstraction that will cause the viewer certain emotions.

Photography is documentary, the photographer has only the surrounding reality, tangible and material at his fingertips. Antoine D’Agata and Michael Ackerman’s disturbing photographs immerse the viewer in inner universes. They’re dark and emotional. There, behind the material canvas, you can see the ideal. Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto explores the passage of time in photography. Thanks to extra-long exposure time a photographer captures in one frame a full-length film, burning of a candle, change of epochs..

I’ve always wondered how you can use a visual tool to show the invisible. And it’s always a challenge for me to capture in a photograph what cannot be seen with the eye.

A mannequin in a store window and participants in a march down Bolshaya Yakimanka Street. 2012

Reporting from my own home

Photographing the personal is probably already a trend in contemporary photography. I too have been touched by this trend, but when I was creating this project I had no idea what was fashionable and up-to-date. It turned out later, when the project was ready.

2012. The civil war in Libya. The event that drove many reporters out of their seats. Someone close to me went to Libya. I really wanted to follow him, but I couldn’t. As it turned out later, I was right to stay.

First, I would be just another young and “green” photographer who went off to war.

Secondly, I told about this war from a very different perspective, from a different point of view. I kept a photographic diary. Every day is a picture of me and what is going on around me. But almost nothing was going on around me, so these were often self-portraits, still lifes taken at my home, and images from the screen of my laptop, to which I was literally chained all the time, waiting for news. Each photo was accompanied by a text, a news headline about what happened in Libya on that particular day.

While I was shooting this story, I honestly did not care about trends and tendencies in contemporary photography, highbrow concepts and other theory. I was scared for my loved one, I was immersed in the news, and it felt like I was in Libya, so deep was the immersion. When someone close to me came back and I finished my project, it was finally possible to calm down and try to look at the project from the outside. I think that this story is not just about me. This is a story about all those women waiting for their loved ones in “hot spots. This is how the specific transformed into a generalization, and the personal became figurative. I’m glad I didn’t go to Libya.

Participants of the punk band Pussy Riot in Khamovnichesky Court. 2012

A boy in a Krymsk courtyard. All the yards after the flood looked more or less the same: a layer of sticky slime and piles of wet things dragged out of the houses. Krasnodar Region, 2012