The unfathomable Alexander Kitaev and his St. Petersburg

Alexander Kitaev’s exhibition at the Lumière Brothers Center for Photography was a real event in the cultural life of New York. Alexander Kitaev is one of the leading photographers of St. Petersburg, an organizer and curator of numerous projects and recently a historian of photography. In the history of photographic recordings of St. Petersburg from the times of Ivan Bianka to the present day, he has indisputably taken his place by creating an inimitable image of the CITY. This is the first time that Kitaev’s main and favorite subject, St. Petersburg, is represented on such a grand scale. The exhibition includes 130 original works by Alexander Kitaev created in the course of a quarter of a century.

The Moon. 1995 g.

Alexander Kitaev from interviews over the years:

“There’s such a thing as a ‘multi-tasker,’ that is, someone who is skilled in more than one job. I’m such a “multi-tasker” in photography.

“My professional credo has been developed by many years of experience: “Never do what is in demand today”. I take common-sense work as an order, as violence against free creativity, which should respond only to the inner movements of the soul.

“At one point I realized that photography had absorbed everything else in me, that in addition to red and white blood particles, my blood composition also included light-sensitive silver halides and without their constant sensation I was not viable, that photography had become my way of life, a way of perception and communication. Happened around 1987.”.

“The camera must become an extension of my hand and free my head to fully immerse myself in the creation of the image.”.

“… St. Petersburg is timeless for me, and I strive to convey the unchanging spiritual core of this city as a Person. She is contradictory, this Personality.”.

“The portrait will never disappear, because every person on this planet is first and foremost interested in himself, in the proposed, or in the assumed circumstances. Another thing is that the portrait is not suitable for the refined intellectual and formal postmodern games that reign in today’s art. It’s important for many artists right now to shout as loudly as possible, “I!!!”. And he doesn’t even care if there is an echo. And in a portrait, the artist is always in second place, with the character in first place. And a portrait is addressed to tomorrow, at least. And a portrait presupposes at least a mastery of the craft, the school. And for contemporary art, all of this is not “relevant”. That’s why many artists today do not make portraits. I’m in the rearguard. For me, “topicality” as applied to art is a swear word.

Alexander Kitaev.Photo by Stanislav Chabutkin.

Ice drift on the Moika. 2003 g.

– Alexander, you have drastically reduced your exhibition activity in the last few years. Your personal exhibitions have become rare, like a holiday. What this exhibition has become for you?

– Indeed, there was a time when I did several solo exhibitions every year, not to mention participating in dozens of group exhibitions. I shot and printed a lot, and I wanted people to see the fruits of my labor. Now I am more and more engaged in the history of photography and teaching. There is less and less time to organize their own exhibitions. But if an offer to hold an exhibition and the conditions are acceptable, I agree. This exhibition is made up of several series and cycles of photographs from the past. Each of these series was in some way a milestone in my life, but they were never exhibited all together. This exhibition can hardly be called a summary, but rather a retrospective.

– You are certainly one of the most famous American photographers. Is it pleasant to be so popular and how do you live with it??

– The term “famous” hardly applies to the photographer. The one behind the lens is very seldom better known than the one in front of it. Perhaps it is the specific character of the profession. How can one not think of architects? Their works of art are constantly before our eyes, we all admire and enjoy them, but very few people remember their faces or the names of their artists. It’s the same with photographers: they illuminate and illuminate the world around them, but they are almost always in the shade. So we can only speak of a very limited level of fame, meaning fame in a certain circle of people who by virtue of their professional activity are in some way or another associated with the “consumption” of photography.

I think there are two objective reasons for my being, as you put it, “famous” in a certain circle . I have been engaged in photography for a long time, and during that time a natural generational change has taken place. And in any community or profession, there must always be a certain authoritative elder… That’s me at the moment. So it’s not about my special talents, it’s just that I have preserved my initial creative impulse and sense of myself, the author, as a tiny link in an endless photographic baton. Well, the other aspect also has to do with time. Around the beginning of the 21st century, with the advent of new photographic technology, photography has been taken up by millions of people all over the world. Many of them want to improve in their hobby and are looking for someone to learn from and be guided by. A lot of people like my photographs – hence, by the law of large numbers, my fame.

And as for “nice” and “how to live”, then, as with any medal, there are two sides. Since I’m in the public eye, I have to look at a lot of photos, most of them bad. And not just to look at, but to say something about them, to explain, because people come to me for advice, for help, for an appraisal. It’s tiring and dulls the eye. At the same time, my popularity allows me to solve many problems with less effort and energy. Whether bidding with buyers or negotiating with officials for exhibitions.

– How to bring up an artist in yourself?

– A lot depends on starting conditions: family, social circle, place of birth, etc. I was born, as they say, in a “simple” family. My parents were peasant children. My father became a car mechanic and my mother became a nurse. So my relatives’ social circle was hardly conducive to artistic pursuits. But they taught me work ethic. As a young man, besides photography, I learned a lot of handicrafts. Working “mechanically” has always been of no interest to me, and I have always invented something and been creative in every profession. When photography came to the forefront of my life, I realized that without changing my social circle I worked as a metalworker in a factory I would not be able to learn the craft, and not the art itself. At that time, in the early 1970s, I was nervously looking around, looking for someone., I joined one of the country’s best photographic clubs at the time: the Vyborg Palace of Culture club. That was the first step. Later, working as a handicraft photographer in a factory, I did a lot of strenuous self-education in the humanities. One more step: in 1987 I became a member of the “Mirror” photoclub, where the creative atmosphere was thriving. Well, then I was lucky: I met and became friends with a remarkable artist and polymath Paul Potekhin. That was the final step in my artistic education.

I’m sure that the title of Artist can’t be a title in itself. At all times and in all generations of photographers there have been photographers whose work has fallen out of favor. In order to somehow mark them out from the crowd, contemporaries called them artists. I have told somewhere that when I had exhibitions and heard from visitors to my side: here he is – an artist, I nervously looked around and searched with my eyes: about whom is it? It turned out to be about me. It was very unfamiliar. Today that title is pretty much compromised. A lot of colleges and universities were training artists in the same time frame as engineers and high school teachers. And many who picked up a camera immediately order a business card which says that its owner is a photographer-artist. I don’t really want to join these ranks. I have a feeling that these days it’s not like that. The term “photographer-artist” made no more sense than “a streetcar passenger.

– You have to know and feel Petersburg very well to be able to shoot it so vividly. How was your vision of the city formed??

– How was it formed?? I’ll try to tell you about it, but don’t think it was a conscious task I set for myself when I was young. Everything happened somehow by itself. I’ve always read a lot, and about St. Petersburg many works were written by great poets and writers and became part of world literature. When I met with the eye of this or that St. Petersburg subject – a square, a street, a building, etc. d., I already knew something about them from the literature. But I’ve always wanted to know more – the biography of the subject I’m interested in: who his parents were, when he was born, what time it was? To satisfy this curiosity I had to study the history of Petersburg, and because of that the history in general the history of Petersburg architecture and architecture in general biographies of the creators and famous inhabitants, and hence the geography. Separately, the iconography of Petersburg and, hence, the history of the fine arts. There is a whole complex, I can’t list everything. One thing is certain for me: The city shaped me and my vision. Maybe I chose to do something. And I’m indebted to him. I don’t know how it happened, but unlike many of my fellow citizens, I don’t go to the barricades in the fight against this or that innovation in St. Petersburg. I know that the “genius of place” will cope with everything that is not to his liking, and God will manage the rest. It seems to me that I have lived in this city for more than three hundred years, and I know that no tactical interventions are able to change its strategy. It’s him, the City, who controls us, not us!

While photographing my own city, I never thought about selling my images and almost never made a commission for it. The customer was always myself. And I made my living and my creative work in other, more applied photography. I think this has put a mark on my pictures.

– Can you name the pictures with which the artist Alexander Kitaev really began?

– You know that I work in different genres? Well, I remember very well a picture after which I said to myself: now you can take pictures of St. Petersburg. That is, I realized that the feeling of St. Petersburg that had lived in me was something that I was able to embody in a photographic sheet. It was around 1982, after more than ten years of photography. It was then that I sensed in myself – and those around me had not yet seen it – that something was beginning to emerge that critics would later call “Kitaev’s Petersburg”. In other genres, it was more or less the same. Except that when I began making photographs around 1989 I immediately began to make something which differed greatly from the work of my predecessors in this genre.

Joseph Brodsky once explained to students that a poet’s work is always a work in progress, a selection, and that the poet is something of a Hercules. His deeds are his poems. It’s impossible to understand what Hercules is by just one, two or three feats. Hercules is all twelve. That’s how it is with photography: you can’t tell from a single photograph just how far you’ve come, or the scale of the photographer. And it’s not Hercules’ business to call my actions feats..

– Is your impeccable command of composition an innate feeling or the result of labor and years of experience??

– Neither. Here I agree with Thomas Mann: “the knack for which one has an inner need is acquired rather quickly.”.

To take a picture is to bombard an emulsion or matrix with photons. This bombardment is not always aimed. But you have to do it at least in a bunch. In order not to get into the milk, one has to acquire the skill of composition. This skill is probably easier and quicker for Petersburgers. Residents of the Neva delta are surrounded by remarkably harmonious space created by first-rate architects, Petersburg museums are full of masterpieces of fine art, providing examples of perfect composition. All this from childhood willy-nilly educates the eye. All that remains is to make use of the fruits of this upbringing and to get a knack for it.

I should note that the so-called laws of composition are not something once and for all discovered, studied and recommended as a must, guaranteeing success. The human eye is becoming more and more equipped, and the classical terms of the laws of composition were formulated in the infancy of the fine arts, in the time of their fairly simple toolkit. “Tonal and linear perspective,” “rhythm,” “story and composition center,” “variety,” etc. p. – No one has ever cancelled that. But a contemporary artist uses ultra-wide-angle or ultra-long-focus lenses, shoots on infrared film or peeks into the invisible with the help of X-rays, etc. d. All this breaks the usual understanding of space and objects, encouraging creative approach to composition rules, adapting them to the modern vision of a person. In my opinion, the laws of composition always arise from the fact of a work. An artist creates a perfect work of art by listening to something from on high, rather than by reading a textbook. A theorist comes along, decomposes the image into its components, weighs it, touches it, measures it, and lays it out. Then he writes recipes for masterpieces.

– The constant pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of something impossible and unattainable?

– No! Just the desire to achieve the maximum possible. There is a kind of tuning fork inside me, and when I listen to it I understand whether or not I have reached. As in any art, there are two aspects here: technique and art itself.

As far as technique is concerned, the situation is as follows. You know that I still work in silver technology? And it, unlike the digital one, doesn’t allow you to take a step back. The whole silver photographic process, with its obligatory multi-step and non-momentary image processing cycle, sets a kind of rhythm to life. The silver 35mm film is only one meter and sixty-five. But every time you deal with her, you get down on your knees. You have to expose it correctly, and you can’t “clean” a film you’ve shot and expose it again. You can’t manifest and not fix, fix and not wash, wash and not dry, etc. d. It’s disciplining. This imposes an obligation, a compulsion to move forward only to the perfect, perfect negative, because in the second stage an equally perfect print-positive has to be created. And there’s a lot of subtleties, responsibilities and pitfalls. Here’s an example. Working with natural paper always requires two hands. Every graphic artist knows that. Graphic artists have always felt, and I was taught to feel, the paper, its texture and density, its behavior in longitudinal and transverse directions. Always appreciated the tactile interaction with her. And how insulting to them, and then to me, was the careless handling of the work on paper! A buyer comes along, takes a sheet with one hand, and that’s it, it’s guaranteed to break! I’m not talking about fingerprints… You can see right away: there’s a dilettante in front of you with a pocket full of circulation papers.

That’s one side of the question. The other is that a photographer who wants to be creative constantly has to squeeze the lab technician out of him or her a little at a time. Oh, how many of my colleagues think that a perfect print is a work of photography, completely forgetting that a work is not so much a product as a message. Imaging technology today is so good that we are totally surrounded by technically competent photographic images. But if they do depict or reflect anything, it is mostly the rather primitive inner world of the creator. And give nothing to the soul or the heart of the sophisticated viewer. Here again I will allow myself to quote Brodsky: “One of the main problems a poet faces today, whether modern or not, is that the poetry that preceded him – in other words, his legacy – is so vast that one simply has to wonder whether you can add to it, modify your predecessors or remain yourself. …To think that you are able to say something qualitatively new after people like Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Auden, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Frost, Eliot.., – is to be a very self-righteous or very ignorant type. I would put myself in the latter category. When you first start writing, you know very little about what came before you. Only in mid-life do you acquire this knowledge, and it nails you to the ground or hypnotizes you.”.

– In judging your own work, you trust only yourself?

– In recent years I try to listen only to myself. I’ve already talked about the inner tuning fork. There are not many hits in unison with me, but I don’t want to dance to someone else’s tune. I don’t even know what else I can add.

But you don’t always have to listen only to yourself. I’ll tell you a story. When I was a photographer in a shipyard, I was irritated by production orders which forced me to make copies of applied photography on precious silver photographic paper. I thought that I could use each sheet of paper to great effect – print some work of fiction on it, or even “netlennka. It was especially infuriating when it was circulations of electrical schematics of this or that device of a submarine or surface ship. There were already light-copying and photocopying machines, faster and cheaper. But no! The sailors’ demands were immutable: only silver prints! I looked into it and found out that in an aggressive environment, only the good old silver technology preserves the image and thereby helps to save the shipwrecked crew. When it comes to the survival of people in extreme situations, how can you argue?? What are my artistic ambitions compared to people’s lives?

– How did the relationship with his colleagues develop, was there a desire for recognition??

– It’s different at different stages. Once upon a time, if not to twist one’s soul, it was of course important to be recognized by one’s peers. And here is why. Historians of the Soviet period wrote about photographers of pre-revolutionary America, for example: “Dmitriev’s creativity developed under difficult conditions of tsarist times”. Nowadays it is often said that this and that grew up in the intolerable conditions of the “soviet state. For photographers, the severity of the situation was exacerbated by the total non-recognition of photography among art forms by Soviet institutions. But that was not what we photographers thought! Besides, we were working in an information vacuum and knew and saw very little from the works of our foreign colleagues, both predecessors and contemporaries. That is why we had to learn most of the time from each other. There were no other specialists! This is a peculiarity of the national photographic community. I remember the influx of gallery owners, curators, and art critics from the West pouring into our country after Perestroika in an attempt to find out from their American colleagues about our contemporary photography. They were dumbfounded: “What?? Photo? Are there such artists??”. That is, photography, like sex, could not exist in the Soviet country..

Then came other times and other attitudes. Somehow, recognition of my colleagues came to me. I know by my own experience how difficult it is to keep the perception and appreciation of the art of old friends and acquaintances pure. I want to distance. Then it’s at least a little bit like the perception of absolute value.

Petersburg. 2005 g.

Trees. 1992 g.

Garden Street estuary.1995 g.

Self-portrait with children. 1995 g.

March. 2008 g.

Bypass Canal. 1995 g.

The Pikal Bridge. 2003 g.