artist entry: week 03: sept 13

ALEXEY TITARENKO: photography: time standing still

interest and relations:
I chose this artist because not only are his images moving in that sense that they are intangible, but there is something mysterious about what the image renders and what it does not. The idea that if one stands still to be rendered "clearly" in a photograph, one must not escape, or "flee" out of the border. The movement shown in the photographs can be seen as escaping from, flee to, walking away, not seeing, and those are fragments of the private mind when it does not feel at peace. I am understanding what is means to escape, the differ "forms", "methods" of escape and what makes us come back. Why do we escape to, just to realize that we need to escape back to where we started? Is it possible to escape, without moving at all?

biography:
"Alexey Titarenko began photographing his hometown of St. Petersburg when he was 8 years old. At that age his aesthetic sensibilities were pretty inchoate; but a mere five years later he was searching the back streets and courtyards of old St. Petersburg, pre-Soviet relics, “under the influence of Dostoyevsky.” When he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Culture in 1983 and began his career work, Winogrand was less than a year away from death. Titarenko’s first body of work was the “Nomenklatura of Signs,” a wryly-ironic riff on the semiotics of the end days of the Soviet Union."

["The ASC: Street-Wise: The Photography of Garry Winogrand and Alexey Titarenko « John Bailey's Bailiwick." ASC: The American Society of Cinematographers. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. .]

quotes:"In the purest tradition of documentary photography, Titarenko plucks fragments from daily life with no staging whatsoever. But the use of long exposures and the subtlety of his black-and-white cameos endow the reality he confronts with a metaphysical dimension, timeless and introspective."
-Veronique Bouruet-Aubertot
Beux Arts Magazine

"The nuances of Titarenko's prints convey solitude and arrested motion, the blurred effect of long exposures and the camera’s intentional movement... The photographs are driven by an intense interest in the esthetics of the image."
-Edward Leffingwell
Art in America

[ALEXEY TITARENKO | PHOTOGRAPHY. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. .]

images:
review link:
http://www.ascmag.com/blog/2009/12/07/street-wise-the-photography-of-garry-winogrand-and-alexey-titarenko/

artist & gallery link:
http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/index.html
http://www.nailyaalexandergallery.com/artist/alexey-titarenko