Alexey Titarenko

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not often that a photographer, particularly a contemporary one, strikes with the force of a painting, a Whistler say, or with the relentless onward stride of Dante’s multitudes moving through his Inferno. Here’s T. S. Eliot:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

In Titarenko’s photos the human mass becomes shadow, shade – it is we who are passing through a landscape that becomes more solid than the crowd – we are a human wave. Titarenko captures the Russian tide passing through the faded, exhausted city of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Metal and stone seem to have more substance and staying power than flesh.

He brings out this evanescent quality of people and light in some haunting shots of Cuba in his Havana Series from 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the series Time Standing Still, the lone figure of a woman at a Russian beach leaning on a silver birch seems to be trying to arrest time. The reclining, leisure-seeking figures seem to be not so much on a physical beach but on a shore of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Titarenko is a marvellous capturer of light and shadow. You can see a full portfolio of his work here: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/index.html