Vladimir Lagrange

Vladimir Lagrange was born in 1939 in Moscow. His interest in photography came from his parents: his father worked as a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, and his mother was a photo editor. In 1959, he comes to work in the TASS photo chronicle as a student of a photojournalist, where he will spend four years, and then for a long time his professional life will be associated with the magazine Soviet Union.
Vladimir Lagrange is known as the “thaw photographer”, a time when the pictorial canon is changing: romantic young people come to replace courageous heroes in magazines and newspapers, and instead of hard work you could see walks around the city. Vladimir Lagrange was one of the first to understand what forms of expression a new generation is looking for. Vladimir Lagrange was one of the first to understand what forms of expression a new generation is looking for. He spoke to the youth with a new language, being himself a young professional, immersed in the life of the thaw.
In 1962, the exhibition “Our Youth” – one of the main events of the year for domestic reporters ─ opens Lagrange’s photo “Doves of Peace”, which the entire exhibition is built. In May 1962, the magazine “Soviet Photo” publishes this picture on a turn, and it will forever remain the “calling card” of the author. In May 1962, the magazine “Soviet Photo” publishes this picture on a turn, and it will forever remain the “calling card” of the author. The action in the frame takes place on Red Square, but Lagrange shifts accents from official symbols to human emotions, with the result that the whole system of perception works differently, even the Kremlin seems to be “unfrozen”.
In 1963, Lagrange began working in the magazine “Soviet Union” and will stay there for more than a quarter of a century. The magazine, which continued the work of the famous “USSR in construction”, largely created the myth of the USSR. Many doors opened in front of the journal’s correspondent, and Vladimir Lagrange drove the country up and down. In 1987, American publishers implement the large-scale project “One Day in the Life of the Soviet Union,” in which Vladimir Lagrange also participates as a guest author.
Vladimir Lagrange is one of the few authors who traveled abroad during the Soviet era. In 1964 he traveled to France. “I will not write here in detail about those impressions, attitudes, surprise that overwhelmed me,” said the photographer. He photographed a country which was unknown to him and an unusual everyday life, and after returning, overnight printed more than two hundred photographs, most of which were not published. In addition to France, the photographer traveled to Italy, Poland and Afghanistan, where he went to shoot already on the withdrawal of troops.
In 1991, the journal Soviet Union was closed. The era of the USSR has ended. Vladimir Lagrange first goes to Rodina magazine, and then to the Moscow bureau of the French agency Sipa Press and continues to shoot a social report. Despite the change in external circumstances, the photographer remains true to his profession.
The works of Vladimir Lagrange are presented in museums and private collections, his exhibitions were held both in Russia and abroad, and in 2002 the author was awarded the highest award of the professional guild of photographers and the Union of Journalists “Golden Eye of Russia”.

Arkady Shaikhet

Arkady Samoylovich Shaikhet was a prominent Soviet photojournalist and photographer. In the history of Soviet photography, Shaikhet is known for a type of journalistic photography called “artistic reportage,” and for photographs of industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s.
His first photographs were published in 1923 and in 1924 he joined the staff of the national magazine Ogonyok. His images were used for their covers from the magazine’s first issue. Shaikhet was one of the founders (together with journalist Mikhail Koltsov) of Soviet Photo in 1926. Starting in 1930 he contributed to USSR in Construction, another Soviet journal.
During the Second World War he created a series of images of the Battle of Stalingrad and later of liberation of Kiev, Ukraine.
The Sovfoto agency, which from 1932 distributed Soviet photography in the West, holds examples of his photojournalism.

Alexander Grinberg

 

 

Alexander D. Grinberg (1885-1979) is one of the most respected Russian photographers of the twentieth century. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, and having lived ninety-four years, he experienced the Russian revolutionary, the Civil War, two world wars, stalinist repression along with numerous fluctuations in soviet political and cultural history. Even as a child Grinberg demonstrated a strong attraction to photography, taking his first photography at the age of ten.
By the age of twenty-two he was an active member of the Russian photographic society, where he became a leading creative force. In 1908 he was awarded the silver medal in the all-Russian photo exhibition in Moscow and the gold medal in the international photo-exhibition in dresden, which signaled the recognition of his talents on an international level.
In 1914 Grinberg was invited to work at the Khanzhankov film studio in Moscow. Becoming the head of the film advertising sections, he quickly established process for mass distribution and here he began his cinematographic career. He went on to work behind the camera for numerous studios. In the 1920’a his cinematographic experience led him to become an instructor at the state technical institute of cinematography where he began his association with Sergey Eisenstein who he photographed. His prestige was on the rise throughout the 1920s until 1929 when, under the storm of the cultural revolution the « old school » of Soviet photography came under fire as « depraved », and Grinberg fell out of favor.
The new cultural policy dictated that any eroticism in artistic forms was a remnant of bourgeois idleness, and inappropriate for soviet society. Nevertheless, Grinberg risked one more exhibition of his work in 1935 with images of partially dressed women, raising a storm of criticism, as well as prompting a few brave photographers to come to the defense of this artistic master. Consequently, for his unorthodox vision of photography he was arrested and sentenced to a labor camp for distribution of pornography. By 1939 he was released on early parole, for good behavior and industriousness, although by the time of his release he had permanently lost his sense of smell. He resumed to work as a photographer for a variety of institutions such as museums and taught photography.
His early work was not destroyed as would have normally happened because his older brother managed to hide the negatives for many years. During the second world war he worked to preserve and restore rare photo archives. After the war he worked in the house of models, photographing for fashion designers. In the 1950s he photographed various Soviet film starts and scientists.
His whole life was thus devoted to photography, which he never abandoned in the most difficult of circumstances.

Yevgeny Khaldei

It is symbolically fitting that Yevgeni Khaldei, who became one of the most significant photojournalists of the 20th-century, was born in the same year as the Russian Revolution. On March 10, 1917, Khaldei was born into a Jewish family, the youngest of six children in Donbass, a Ukrainian steel town. He was introduced to the horrors of the Russian Revolution on March 13, 1918 during a pogrom, when a bullet fired by an anti-Jewish gunman passed through Khaldei’s side and into his mother, killing her.
His childhood was about survival. He subsisted on grass during a great famine that killed many of his countrymen. At eleven, he worked cleaning steam engines in exchange for food. At the age of twelve he left school and began to work in a steel factory. This is where his passion for photography was realized. He created a crude box camera with a lens from his dead Grandmother’s eye-glasses and experimented by taking portraits of his sisters. At the age of fifteen his photographs started to appear in his local paper Socialist Donbass. Yevgeni Khaldei portrayed the local miners and steelworkers as pioneers building the Great Utopia.
By the time he was eighteen years old, he had landed a job as a staff photographer at the Tass news agency based in Moscow. When the German troops invaded Russia, Khaldei was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Soviet army. He was sent out to photograph the Second World War carrying a camera, a backpack, chemicals to develop film, and a black leather coat. He covered all 1,481 days of the War between Russia and Germany as a correspondent for the Tass News Agency and much of this work was published in Pravda.
The images that Khaldei took during the War were later compiled to create the album From Murmansk to Berlin, a chronicle of the Russian involvement in the War. At the outbreak of the Second World War Khaldei was sent to the Arctic city of Murmansk. He was stationed with a group of British pilots who were sent to protect the Arctic convoys.
In April of 1945, the Russians reached Berlin. Khaldei planned to photograph the capture of the city as it unfolded. When he realized that there were no Soviet flags in the city, he hopped on a plane to Moscow and searched throughout the day for a flag. As he entered a shop, he noticed some red tablecloths used for formal events. He borrowed three of these tablecloths from a reluctant shop worker named Grisha Lubinskii. Khaldei brought them to his uncle, a tailor, who then stayed up all night to sew on the hammer and sickle and yellow star.
Rushing back to Berlin he raised the first make shift flag over the Great German Eagle at the Tempelhof Airport on April 28. On May 2, Khaldei reached the Brandenburg Gate and witnessed a group of Russian troops being told that Hitler was dead. Khaldei immediately climbed the staircase of the gate and placed the second tablecloth-flag at the top with the bronze horses. Khaldei was determined to place the final Red Army flag at the top of the Reichstag. When he reached the burnt out structure, fighting was still going on in the basement. Khaldei and three comrades ascended to the roof of the Reichstag, which was slippery with blood from the fierce fighting just hours before. Khaldei then snapped one the most dramatic images of the century as the Russian soldiers raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag.
At the War’s end Khaldei was at the Potsdam conference to photograph the victorious leaders and sent to Manchuria for the last days of the Soviet Army’s campaign against the Japanese. In the fall of 1945 he documented the war crimes trial in Nuremberg where many Nazis were convicted. After the war’s end Khaldei made a very modest living working in film labs and continuing to photograph for Russian publications. He died in Moscow on October 6th, 1997 at the age of 80.

Emil Gataullin

Emil Gataullin is a Russian photographer, based in the Moscow region Korolyov, Russia.
His oeuvre was largely unknown in the west until he submitted some black-and-white photographs of village life in Russia to the Alfred Friend Photography Award in 2014. His picture of two boys, upside down on a swing, became the Peace Photo of the Year. Gataullin’s photographs are characterized by a quiet, slightly melancholy, poetry. The pictures are a reflection of Emil Gataullin’s life, beginning with his childhood in a small town beyond Moscow where he spent almost all his holidays with his grandmother and his uncle. His memories reach back into experiences where he tended cattle, gathered mushrooms and went fishing. Gataullin describes these memories as the best time of his life, which is a key sentence for understanding his escape from Moscow, his return to the village, where he lives with his wife and daughter in a suburban estate from the Khrushchev period. Through his camera, he gropes towards a non-verbal communication and pays attention to the people and things he sees.

Ilina Vicktoria

Ilina Vicktoria is a Russian photographer, mainly portraits and nudes, black&white.

Kristina Syrchikova

Kristina Syrchikova is a documentary photographer and a visual storyteller based Samara, Russia.

Her work primarily focuses on social and human rights issues in post-Soviet space. 

Kristina first studied information technology, before turning to contemporary photography at the FotoDepartament Institute and documentary photography at the DocDocDoc School in St Petersburg. 

Kristina’s work has been recognized with industry awards such as New Talents, Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2018, The Kolga Photo Award, Efremov Report Photography Competition, ESPY Photography Award, Young photographers of Russia among others.

Her work has been presented in exhibitions and screens in Russia and abroad, including Asian Women Photographers’ Showcase (Objectifs, Singapore, 2017), Orvieto Fotografia 2017 (Palazzo Coelli, Orvieto, Italy, 2017), Third Documentary Photography Days (Photography Foundation of Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016), Evolution of sight. 1991−2016 (Photobiennale 2016, Central exhibition hall Manege, Moscow, Russia).
Her work has appeared in multiple online and print publications worldwide including Musee Magazine (USA), Der Greif (Germany), COLTA.RU (Russia), Takie Dela (Russia), IM Magazine, Foto&video (Russia), dekoder, Science and Life (Russia), Russian reporter, Splash & Grab, Bird In Flight, Dodho Magazine, FOG (Germany).
She is a member of The Russian Union of Art Photographers.

www.syrchikova.name

Fedor Shmidt

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Body Talks, Anka Zhuravleva

Anka was born on December 4, 1980. She spent her childhood with books on art and her mothers’ drawing tools, covering acres of paper with her drawings. In 1997 she entered the Moscow Architectural Institute deciding to follow in her mothers’ footsteps. But at the end of 1997 her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died in less that a year. Then her father died in 1999.

After that Anka’s life changed dramatically. In attempt to keep sane, she plunged into an alternative lifestyle – working as a tattoo artist, singing in a rock-band, sometimes looking for escape in alcohol. In order to make a living while studying, Anka worked at several modeling agencies. Thanks to the drawing lessons she wasn’t afraid to pose nude, and her photos appeared in the Playboy and XXL magazines and at the Playboy 1999 photo exhibition. But she was not looking for a modeling career – it was just a way to make some money.

In 2001 Anka was working in the post-production department at the Mosfilm StudiosThat same winter one of her colleagues invited her to spend a week-end in Saint-Petersburg with his friend, composer and musician Alexander Zhuravlev. In less than a month Anka said farewell to Moscow, her friends, her Mosfilm career and moved in with Alexander in Saint-Petersburg. Living with her loved one healed her soul, and she regained the urge for painting. She made several graphic works and ventured into other areas of visual arts. In 2002 Gavriil Lubnin, the famous painter and her husband’s friend, showed her the oil painting technique, which she experimented with for the following several years. During that period she made just a few works because each one required unleashing of a serious emotional charge. All those paintings are different as if created by different people.

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Ambrotypes, Serge Romanov

For more than a century and a half one of the most fascinating novel that is the history of the Russian photography has been written. . Nowadays the events of the novel unfold in the decoration of various historical epoch, every one of them are seen through the eyes of the avowed masters of photography who honour the experience of their predecessors. The young generation longing for ultimate freedom also create using and analyzing the previous achievements in the area. Undoubtedly, books, the internet and a great number of seminars and master-classes give the opportunity to anybody to learn the experience of the previous masters of photography. However, how often do photographers address to it in daily practice?

Throughout history people have been eager for fairy tales, romantic and fantastic stories you could hardly believe. A fairy tale is mystery, that cannot be revealed by any any teller, but only those of them who believe in and see…To see what is hidden in the unreal world of the fairy tale, to see love that makes our real world be not empty . The basis for invention of the photography is said to be the observation of the famous Greek scientist Aristotle. In the sixth century BC he described unusual phenomena of the light going through small hole in the window shutter that painted the landscape on the wall that was seen behind the window. Thus, long before the appearance of the first shot the process of developing into the light was defined as mystery.

A piece of art is born not among theatrical scenery, but in the photographic studio where every object is functional. You can realize the magic of the space only after seeing what is being born here. There are no unnecessary objects in the studio of the Moscow photographer Serge Romanov , though everything from the antic wooden cameras ( repaired, in perfect working condition) and old optical devices till the characters who visit the place resemble the first frames of cult movie “ The Phantom of the Opera.” Once forgotten, gone out chandelier flashes out again and the world comes to life with genuine colors. The history of the studio of Serge Romanov started when “ the photography captivated him as a kind of art.” According to his words, it happened 25 years ago. It was simply interesting to capture what he saw around. There were neither camera nor films, nor money to develop and print films. His first camera was his own eyes.

Then there were photo-shoots for the most prestigious glossy magazines such as Playboy, XXL, and works for such companies as ТНТ, Vnukovo Airlines, FashionTV,Rive Gauche, FHM, STSTV, MuzTV and some others. He was recognized and was invited to a number of countries to give masterclasses and exhibited his work in the most famous art galleries in the world. That really attracted him until he realized how expendable this kind of work could be. Adverts and glossy prints are interesting and important only for the period of time of a magazine’s latest publication or an advertising campaign’s launching, in other words for one or two weeks. This sort of work is performed collectively and the proverb goes that too many cooks spoil the broth. Most of these works are boring and unvaried.

You are unlikely to have heard the word ambrotype unless you have devoted your life to photography. In the middle of the nineteen century it was the invention of the ambrotype that made photography more popular and available. Then, in March 1851, the Englishman Frederic Scott Archer delivered a report on wet collodion process in photography at the Royal Scientific Society in Great Britain and at the Paris Academy of Science. Archer called the wet plate collodion process ambrotype . The ambrotype means immortal image in the ancient Greek.

The ambrotype as a fairy tale can be created only when you trust in it. Serge Romanov came into the world of the ambrotype mysterious way. He has become one of the best professional in this area and he doesn’t care about his being popular and only sometimes agrees to exhibit his works as he doesn’t want turn his art into commodity. Serge Romanov remarked that the ambrotype came into his life as a sort of protest against the glossy emasculating picture. Only after some time had passed he realized that the wet collodion process had an indirect relation to photography as the ambrotype was an artifact. That’s why working with such an image means creation of an artifact. It might have been at that exact moment when he understood that he had grown into an artist. As for his style, he admitted he didn’t know or he might be afraid to utter it aloud, supposing that as soon as he does it he loses it.

The photo shots of Serge Romanov are easily recognized, even by those ones who don’t know the name of the photographer and are unaware of the wet collodion method. His photo-shots are argued about, they are referred to, copied and posted on the profile at the social websites. Also there are videos with his interview and lectures where he mentions masters who has influenced his art , they are Pieter Bruegel, Lucas Cranach, Giorgione and Baldassarre Peruzzi, Hans Rudolf Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński and others. Serge Romanov called himself a simple observer with a camera and when opening the camera shutter he simply waited for a miracle to come and it did at the end.

Following the rules of the told fairy-tale, Romanov confirmed them, saying, that the best thing that could have happened to photography was that it became available to everybody. It stopped belonging to a narrow circle of swaggering people looking like possessing some sacred knowledge. A number of nice photos didn’t increase after that, but a nice photo was distinctive in the swarm.

The creation of the ambrotype by Romanov is the sacrament comparing with the masquerade farfetched performance of those who are in pursuit of fame. Possessing only superficial knowledge about the process of taking pictures photographers commercialize the thing. They are interested in presentation, not in the process of creation. The debates about commercialized epatage of modern photographers won’t come down but occupying pages of more than half released article and reviews. Nevertheless, people are eager for fairy tales. People believe in artless words of those who knows that the main mystery is love.

Serge Romanov supposes that a photo itself cannot be evaluated. He takes into consideration a certain style of life of the personality, the way of giving oneself up to business and what it results in. In conclusion, we would like to say that his works seem to become the chapter of the history of the Russian philosophy where the window is the light anyway.

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Boris Davidov

Iana Tokarchuk

I was born in the USSR. Currently I live and work in Kiev, Ukraine. My childhood was marked by immersion in art, as I painted ceaselessly from a very young age. At some point I also began writing short stories and plays. This made me pay particular attention to narration in any visual art I do, as an image always tells a story (or stories) to its spectator.

When I was 14 my father gave me and my sister cameras as a present, and by the age of 18 I firmly decided that this is what I want to associate my life with. For 5 years I have been working in fashion photography with my twin-sister, but now we work mostly separately.

Recently I started experimenting with filmmaking and diversifying into different genres of photography.

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Yulia Napolskaya

 

I am not a good writer, so I express myself in pictures. In photography, there are artists, there are traders, there are singers of the female body, there are masters of horrors, as touch me — I am a clown. I like to amuse people and to propose them small puzzles. My spectators invented the name of the my art direction -“scenic photoart” and they are right. My works are mainly the stories, tales and anecdotes. The photo should carry some sort of message and not just a pretty picture. It is Great Art to be able to express own thoughts through visuals so that its could be clear to spectators. Laugh and irony, it is the most direct and effective way to deliver serious thought to the most people. Humor will save the world

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Boris Bugaev

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Karina Marandjian

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Karen Abramyan

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Alexander Petrosyan

After taking up photography in the year 2000, Alexander Petrosyan realized that, in order to truly understand the world around him, he must first try to capture it through the camera lens, something at which he has continuously succeeded. Petrosyan finds true joy in exploring and portraying his subjects in innovative ways, photographing not only the beautiful but also the grotesque aspects of life.

Working for My District magazine from 2003 to 2008, Petrosyan became a true professional, able to accurately present the three-dimensional with only two dimensions, and to illuminate the infinite levels of his environment in a single photograph.

At present,  Petrosyan is a staff photographer for “Kommersant” (http://www.kommersant.ru/), where he continues to push the limits of his surroundings, proving that there is something extraordinary about even the most, seemingly, ordinary aspects of life.

Constantine Gedal

Born in the snows of no-man’s land Constantine liked to spend hours looking into the ice, that’s how some say he’s got his name (meaning stable, permanent) though others suggest that he was just a schizophrenic. Fleeing Tartar-Mongol invasion, Gedal moved to Europe, where he became good friends with Savonarola, with the later he went to the Holy Land. Though Savonarola was sent right away, Constantine was allowed to stay for a while to learn local traditions and languages.
Having heard of the preparations of the new crusade he departed for Koeln to arrive there a month too late to prevent a campaign that later proved to be disastrous. But his journey was not all in vain. In the Northern Europe
he got involved in an art movement that was to become known as Flemish Art. During that time he was a regular guest at Van Eyck’s and Van der Goes’s.

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Igor Koshelev

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https://www.instagram.com/koshelev.photo/
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https://www.facebook.com/igorkoshelevphoto/

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Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Pinkhassov’s interest in photography began while he was still at school. After studying cinematography at the VGIK (the Moscow Institute of Cinematography), he went on to work at the Mosfilm studio and then as a set photographer.

In 1978 Pinkhassov joined the Moscow Union of Graphic Arts and obtained the status of an independent artist. His work was noticed by the prominent Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who invited Pinkhassov to the set to make a reportage about his film ‘Stalker’ (1979).

Pinkhassov moved permanently to Paris in 1985. He joined Magnum Photos in 1988. He works regulary for the international press, particularly for Geo, Actuel and the New York Times Magazine. His book, Sightwalk, explores individual details, through reflections or particular kinds of light, often approaching abstraction

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