New wave: 24 photographers changing the way we see Russia
A new generation of photographers is emerging in Russia, with a vision and an aesthetic that offers a fresh take on classic questions about Russian identity and the possibilities of their art form. From beguiling portraiture to striking landscapes, this is the new wave: 24 photographers reimagining Russia for the world
30 May 2014
Text
Anastasiia Fedorova
-
Kirill Savchenkov
Another photographer to take Russia’s unrelenting suburbs as his muse, artist and photographer Kirill Savchenkov seeks to reveal the psychology of its inhabitants and its relationship with the landscape. His photography uses narrative techniques and contemporary technology to explore utopian ideas in projects like Atlas and Umwelt.
-
Olya Ivanova
Ivanova’s most celebrated projects are her chronicles of life today in Russia’s remote villages — small, fragile communities lost in the countryside. Ivanova’s main strength is portraiture: her subjects feel both formal, like shots from an old photo album, and emotional — her shots of gay scene in pre-olympic Sochi have a Nan Goldin-like sincerity.
-
Alexey Bogolepov
Alexey Bogolepov’s main focus is architecture and the ideology of Modernism, both in the former Soviet states and worldwide. He explores the suburbs of big cities, both those built in Soviet times and more recently, striving to fix this space in a historical and visual culture.
-
Jana Romanova
Jana Romanova’s personal approach to serious political and social topics has won her international recognition. Her project Waiting — intimate portraits of couples expecting babies — was an internet hit; two other books, Shvilishvili and Alphabet of Shared Words, deal with Russia’s troubled relationship with its neighbours Georgia and Ukraine.
-
Max Sher
Max Sher’s current project Russian Palimpsest is an ambitious attempt to create a photographic catalogue of the whole vast country and to introduce a new visual language by which to understand Russia. Sher travels around the country scrupulously avoiding the obvious sights, preferring instead to capture the everyday, from regional airports to petrol stations.
-
Fedor Telkov
Based in Yekaterinburg, Fedor Telkov is truly committed to documenting his native Ural region. Together with collaborator Sergey Poteryaev, he is creating a catalogue of people, situations, interiors and landscapes, with a particular focus on the dwindling populations of native, non-Russian peoples like the Mari people and Mansi.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
-
Anna Skladmann
Based between London and Moscow, Anna Skladmann uses clear, powerful portraits to compile a quasi-ethnographic catalogue of Russia’s social and historical diversity: holidaymakers on the Black Sea, workers at a meat market, the pampered offspring of oligarchs — all stare down the camera, open and rooted in their context.
-
Liza Faktor
In Liza Faktor’s work, looking is often more important than finding. The theme of searching has recurred in her many exhibitions: for the most enchanting Siberian landscape, for the perfect place to live in the Russian countryside, for a definition of baroque or for the perfect balance between public and private.
-
Ekaterina Bazhenova
Bazhenova shoots fashion editorials for leading fashion titles like Pop, Interview and Husk but remains true to her avant-garde approach with images that channel 18th-century still lives even as they play games with focus and sexual innuendo. Bazhenova, who lives in London, has a parallel career as a video artist.
-
Daria Tuminas
Daria Tuminas defines herself as both a photographer and a folklorist. Working from Amsterdam, she uses the myths and legends that grow up in small towns and villages to tell deeply personal stories, looking through the eyes of young teenagers to glimpse the fairy-tale world that lurks beneath the quotidian surface of country life in Russia.
-
Egor Rogalev
Egor Rogalev’s main interest is the post-Soviet landscape, its inhabitants and the transformations that the urban and social environment are going through. He shoots a lot of material while travelling around Russia and former Soviet countries, but remains committed to exploring the suburbs of his native St Petersburg.
-
Christina Abdeeva
Based between Moscow and Paris, Abdeeva explores alternative approaches to fashion photography. Still conventionally beautiful, her shots are charged with alienation, always alluding to a bigger landscape and a more complex narrative.
-
Masha Demianova
Demianova, a pioneer of the female gaze in Russian photography, brings a cinematic sensibility to her images, always hinting at some narrative behind the action. When she’s not busy applying her experimental style to model test shoots, she like to photograph her friends in the suburbs of her hometown Moscow or to rethink the landscapes she sees on her travels, like her mystical and strangely Russian LA or her ghostly take on New York.
-
Maria Gruzdeva
London-based Maria Gruzdeva is a Central Saint Martins and London College of Communication graduate who draws inspiration from prominent western artists and art theory, although the issues connect the past and present in Russia remain central to her work. She is currently working on a long-term project investigating into Russia's post-Soviet consciousness, identity and aesthetics.
-
Alexander Gronsky
Alexander Gronsky portrays post-Soviet landscapes in all their vast desolate urban beauty, from the outskirts of Moscow to the industrial wastelands of Norilsk.
-
Anna Filipova
London-based Anna Filipova documents Russia’s Far North (including Svalbard, home to the most northerly mines in the world) in distinguished black and white, in her words “free from the distraction of colour to create a serious tone of documentation”.
-
Slava Mogutin
An articulate rebel once described as a bastard child of Mayakovsky and Helmut Newton, Slava Mogutin is a writer, multi-disciplinary artist and photographer. Now based in New York after being driven from Russia, his main subjects are lost boys and fellow artists, his uncompromising content ranging from wistfully romantic homoeroticism to slap-in-the-face obscenity.
-
Evgenia Arbugaeva
Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in the Arctic town of Tiksi and continues to document life in the Russian North, with a gaze that is at once, clear, personal and slightly naive. Arbugaeva is now represented by galleries in New York and Paris and her works exhibited around the world.
-
Igor Samolet
One of the young stars to emerge from Moscow’s Rodchenko Art School, Igor Samolet’s first photo book Be Happy! in 2013, won immediate international recognition for its depictions of wild youth. His work feels very Russian and very contemporary, using personal experiences and unexpected combinations of image and object.
-
Nadia Sablin
Nadia Sablin was born in the Soviet Union but spent her teenage years in America’s Midwest. Most of her latest projects are shot in Russia, where she explores the villages and cities where her forefathers lived. Sablin’s photography resists the urge to exoticise, instead portrays Russia with the universalising power of the great American masters.
-
Sasha Rudensky
Yale graduate Rudensky, now based in Brooklyn, is part of the new generation of photographers who left Russia as children but returned in the Noughties to rediscover the country, camera in hand. Her far-reaching visual essays Remains and Novij Mir combine the aestheticising view of an outsider with an insider’s affection and attention to detail.
-
Alexander Veryovkin
Before turning to photography, Veryovkin studied astrophysics at university and he makes constant references to his discipline in his images. Using manual and digital tools to manipulate images, he reflects on the relationship between photography and time, making photo projects that resemble art projects in their technological and theoretical complexity.
-
Anastasia Tsayder
Like many of her peers, Anastasia Tsayder documents everyday Russia, but unlike most, she’s chosen interiors over landscapes, documenting the intimacy of dimly lit rooms in village houses or the tacky, cluttered social spaces of schools and hospitals.
-
Margo Ovcharenko
Margo Ovcharenko works with adolescence, sexuality and definitions of masculinity and femininity approaching seemingly sensitive topics with no shame or sense of reservation. The results can be tough or tender, sensual or cold, but they are always ultimately sincere.
