As a street photographer who wants to evolve and thrive to perfection, I am constantly browsing the internet in search of talented photographers. I then analyze and look closely into their work trying to learn their techniques and then applying it to my own work. This is how I discovered absolutely amazing and magic world of Alexey Titarenko. It’s not that his photography was unknown to the large public. He is a very recognized and famous photographer. But for me, it was a shocking discovery of his untraditional and very unique vision into the world that was very familiar to me. I started to read about his work and his artistic experiments. I was astonished by how similar my life experience was.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this though because Alexey and I are coming from the same generation of post-Soviet people who survived Perestroika and kept our nostalgic love to the turbulent time of the USSR. His love is strongly felt especially in his magnificent project named “City of Shadows”.
Alexey shares his memories of childhood. “During the sixties, my family had a small room of fifteen square meters in a communal apartment in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). There I lived with my parents, grandmother, and aunt, who was then a student. I often disturbed them, mostly at dawn, because I woke very early and didn’t know how to keep myself occupied. The morning wait was unbearably boring — each moment seemed as long as a lifetime. To put an end to this situation, the adults taught me how to read. Reading affected me profoundly, stimulating my imagination and sensibility, giving me the desire to dream and especially to dream while taking walks. Reading also altered my vision of the surrounding reality, endowing it with mystery and intrigue.”( http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/essay).
Reading this I can relate to his memories because it is exactly how I grew up in the communal apartment sharing the kitchen and the bathroom between the other five families living in the same apartment. Like Alexey, I also started reading books at a very early age and possessed a very strong imagination that often got me into trouble.
Alexey was very lucky to discover photography at a very early age. He was 9 years old when he received his first camera as a present and learnt photography in the local photography club for children.
Alexey was born and grew up in Saint Petersburg, a majestic and poetic city with a very strong cultural atmosphere. One of the greatest Russian writers Fyodor Dostoevsky described Saint Petersburg in his masterful novels. Alexey was very influenced by Dostoevsky literature. He saw the city with Dostoevsky eyes and his main, most powerful photographic work was also dedicated to Saint Petersburg.
Dostoyevsky was one of the writers who sparked my desire to discover this hidden facet of things. After reading Poor Folk, Humiliated and Insulted, and Crime and Punishment, I was most attracted to the types of buildings where his characters lived: labyrinthine courtyards with multiple entries—sometimes with walls so high and narrow that you seemed to be in a well, dilapidated stalls, and places where the marginalized society was found, alcoholics, tramps. Leningrad, its historical sides and in particular Vasilyevsky Island, where I lived, was filled with such people. I spent entire days exploring such places” http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/essay).
Classical music had an enormous influence on Alexey’s artistic process. He remembers how he was listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky while working on his project about Saint Petersburg. Shostakovich music had an especially powerful impact on Alexey’s photography. I literally can hear the majestic accords of the Shostakovich symphony looking at Alexey Titarenko “City of Shadows”.
As tragic and dramatic the time of Perestroika was for the destiny of the entire generation of Soviet people, this particular time was in my opinion when the photographic talent of Titarenko flourished and attained the level that was never achieved by anyone in the entire history of Russian photography. He could show the tragedy of the people’s broken hopes and false illusions. Each of his photographs is filled with bitter sentiments and shattered expectations.
“The years passed. People wearied of this interminable descent into hell. The situation continued to worsen. Added to the shortage of necessities was the collapse of the healthcare system. Retirement became nonexistent. People vanished, as if they had secretly emigrated, or died. Crime invaded the city and spread. By the middle of the 1990s, Saint Petersburg was perceived more as a capital of organized crime than as a cultural centre; a television series, Gangster Petersburg, was broadcast on a national channel. Like others, I was depleted and disappointed. Hopes raised after the fall of the USSR had not been borne out. Slowly, however, the survival instinct compelled me to search for things that could bring some sort of moral respite, if only briefly” (http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/essay).
Looking at these photos I can see myself in this crowd of devastated people who sell cigarettes to buy food.
His work is very personal to me because my fate is very similar to the fate of millions of Russian people who had to go through all circles of hell to be reborn. Titarenko’s work reflected it on a very profound level.
Shostakovich music raises up in crescendo to the unseeing tsunami waves of human desperation and untold catastrophes.
