- What did your project grow from - to shoot all the buildings of Konstantin Melnikov?
- This winter I rented his garages "Intourist" and the State Planning Commission, the club of the factory "Svoboda", the club them. Frunze - by the way, one of the most difficult to photograph from the entire list, since there is very little free space around, a heavy industrial zone - and I had the idea to get to the rest of the buildings, for example, I wanted to rent a club for them. Rusakov after restoration. But the formal reason was that I was contacted by the staff of the Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchusev, who are preparing for August 3, 2015, for the anniversary of Konstantin Melnikov, an exhibition, a book and a series of events. They asked me to give their pictures for this book, and I thought that it would be possible to remove more buildings, since such a wonderful occasion presented itself. Everything turned out very quickly. The museum called me at the end of June, and I only had a week and a half to shoot eight objects.
At the same time, I even got to Dulev. An amazing place: there are practically no fences around the building - a rare occurrence. The Melnikov Club of the Dulevo Porcelain Factory is not so badly preserved, although, of course, they changed a lot there: the wooden facade at the entrance in the center has been replaced with metal sheets painted to resemble bricks, it all looks depressing. The roof is completely new. But the building itself was well preserved, and an employee of the Palace of Culture told me that she had been working there for 35 years, and this club never stopped functioning, life is still in full swing there. The only thing was that I was not allowed to shoot inside, explaining this by the political situation and the upcoming elections.
How many objects are there in the series?
- Twelve. That is, almost all the buildings of Konstantin Melnikov that remain.
And this is shooting both buildings outside and their interiors?
- No, for the most part - only outside, because all these are now commercial objects, and there is always a guard who says that it is forbidden to shoot. Although there are rare cases when these people even help. The last item on my Melnikov list is the office of the Novo-Sukharevsky market, and some miracle happened there, because all the security guards I encountered around this object helped me. The security guard who guards the office itself, the guards of the neighboring buildings - a residential building, a business center, a communications company - they let me on the roof, and I managed to remove this Melnikov building from above from all angles. The only thing, for her now is not the season, of course: it is covered with greenery. One of the security guards told me that before the roof of the market office had a promenade, which in principle corresponds to the spirit of the avant-garde, although I have not yet verified this fact.
I had a similar case of dialogue with the guards in
Paleontological Museum, built by Yuri Platonov. I photographed him in January, the coldest day of the month. I found that my head could hardly turn, because the scarf was frozen to my beard, and when I went inside, as I wanted to shoot at least the patio, and was refused, I asked the employee for tea to warm up. We got into a conversation with her, and then she asked her superiors for me, and, as a result, I was allowed to click from the window of the courtyard.
Returning to Melnikov: have you seen how his buildings were filmed before you, in particular, the work of Igor Palmin? Has it influenced you in any way? Or did you want to do something completely different?
- Any object that I shoot, I try to study as much as possible - how it was shot and what they wrote about it in order to understand the context. And I always try to find a fundamentally different approach compared to photographs by other authors.
Is it difficult to shoot objects that are not in perfect condition, let's call it that? Many buildings of the avant-garde and post-war modernism are sometimes rebuilt or dilapidated. Do you set yourself the task of finding the “original” in a building that has changed its appearance over the decades? Or are you trying to convey its current state?
- I, rather, try to catch his current state, avoiding, by the way, embellishment. Although in the very nature of architectural photography lies "embellishment". I had a typical dialogue on this topic on the social network under the photo of INION, which
I managed to shoot two weeks before the fire - it just happened. And under the photo they left a comment with the following content: "For 20 years I have been walking past this INION to the metro, I go about my business, and he always seemed so scary, but in the photo he is nothing - even beautiful at all." I think the point is that a photograph can show a building as a whole. This is the property of human vision - its focus is very narrow, and in order to collect a general picture, the pupil "jumps" strongly, collects this information, transfers it to the retina, and then this picture is formed in the brain, but all the same: the whole building is sharp, clear and focus we can only see in the photograph. Close up, only individual parts are visible, from a distance it is already difficult to see it well, and the photograph gives us a chance to look at the whole building for the first time. The same INION is so long, elongated, and at a given moment we see only one piece of it, and this piece is shabby, and hence the general unfavorable impression.
What makes the biggest impression on your work?
- Light. There is an opinion that in winter, when there is white or more often gray, dirty snow, dirty streets and practically no light, and in similar conditions, architecture can only be filmed for real, because uniform illumination shows the natural color of the building without distorting the white color, etc..d. But, in my opinion, without light, the building loses some of its human side, becoming one of the "bricks" in the system. For those who understand this system, this may be important, but for everyone else, the building really turns into gray shabby bricks, and they have negative connotations: gray, colorless mass buildings of the Soviet era - and this building, despite the fact that it another, and there are other ideas in it, stands up for the ordinary viewer in a series of these gray buildings. However, there is a downside: in reality, a gray, colorless, unimportant building "comes to the fore" if it is shot in sunny weather, against the background of a blue sky.
How did you get involved in architectural photography, what inspired you to do this?
- I used to shoot geometric abstractions, did
art photography.
And architecture was originally a material for artwork?
- Yes, just such architects as Melnikov made a lot of interesting details, and for this purpose the building can be removed in parts, although in this case it loses its identity. And if you shoot a building as a building, then the photo will have a context that does not depend on me. Even the composition sometimes does not depend on me, which depresses me a little, because the architect came up with the composition, and my task is simply not to add anything superfluous to this composition, which is many times easier than in artistic photography, where the composition must be created by yourself, especially if it is an abstract photograph.
And I was shooting in the abstraction genre until I met Vladimir Fridkes, who praised my work, but assumed that I was isolated in this world, for me this is a comfort zone and therefore I do not shoot anything else. I really don't understand at all, for example, how to photograph a person, and I feel uncomfortable doing it. And after talking with Vladimir I decided to try something different, and the first thing that came to my mind was an architectural photography. And I liked doing it: meeting a building is like a date, because it happens in a purely romantic setting, at sunrise or closer to sunset, because this is the best watch for shooting - with soft light without the centering blows of the sun. And there is no one around, because it’s early morning: by the way, there’s no one in Moscow, in St. Petersburg for some reason at 4 o'clock in the morning people even play football on the street. Personal communication is developing between me and the building, I don't know how to describe it more accurately, but there is a certain intimate moment here.
- Do you have
portfolio - exclusively XX century, avant-garde and post-war modernism: what is it connected with?
- Although I do not like some of the ideas of the avant-garde, the same communal houses as a way of life, I really like the way the architects of that time worked with forms. It was such a revolution when they pushed off from symmetry, pushed off from the central generatrix, pushed off from orders, from the classics, when they, almost like Loos, put the decor almost at the level of crime. I have always had this principle “in a different way”, and when most of the people around me since childhood considered classical architecture the best, and the more curlicues and sculptures on the facade, the more beautiful, since everyone liked it, I should have liked something other. I realize this is an ambiguous principle, but it works for me.
