City of Shadows Alexey Titarenko
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CITY OF SHADOWS ALEXEY TITARENKO uring 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 dis- turbed 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 Daltered my vision of the surrounding reality, endowing it with mystery and intrigue. It seemed to me that behind the buildings, trees, and certain objects in the street — street- lights, for example — something magical lingered. A burning desire to see the hidden aspect of things overtook me. At such moments, I experienced an excitement that I had never felt before: I sensed an invitation to discover an unknown substance, material or spiritual. These moments made me happy, so happy that upon returning home, to the humble reality of daily life, I could only think about one thing: how to capture these special moments so that I would have them near me at my disposal, and to render these instances into a permanent mode of life. Around the same time, someone gave me an old, prewar camera, Komsomolets (mean- ing “Young Communist”). It was simple, even rudimentary for medium-format film, but to me it seemed complicated, impenetrable, yet at the same time promising: What if this black box could Tuchkov Pereulok 12/12, St. Petersburg, 1996 14 15 capture the brief moments of reality that made me so happy? I found the idea brilliant, so I coaxed reality, where all arts were considered instruments my parents into signing me up for the children’s photography workshop at the Kirov Cultural of propaganda, and there was no space for the ex- Palace, just before my ninth birthday. pression of an authentically personal sentiment. Dostoyevsky was one of the writers whose novels sparked my desire to discover this hid- I was initially inspired by Bach, Mozart, Bee- den facet of things, to see them differently. After reading Poor Folk, Humiliated and Insulted, and thoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky: composers whose Crime and Punishment, I was most attracted to the types of buildings where his characters lived: musical language was more accessible. However, labyrinthine courtyards with multiple entrances — sometimes with walls so high and narrow that I also listened to Shostakovich. At first spontane- you seemed to be in a well, dilapidated stalls, and places where marginalized society was found, ously and then in relation to my personal history, I alcoholics, tramps. Leningrad, its historical city center and in particular Vasilyevsky Island, where sensed the profundity and importance of his mu- I lived, was filled with such people. I spent entire days exploring such places. sic: my parents and grandparents are survivors Unfortunately, haunting these places didn’t enable me to create original images. The pictures of both the Gulag (my father was born in a camp that came out of the magical box were even less interesting than my surroundings had seemed to as the “Son of Enemies of the People”) and of the me before I learned to read. I couldn’t produce prints that aroused in me the same unique emotion Nazi blockade of Leningrad. I was told in the Phil- I felt in the streets, and I attributed this failure to a technical imperfection, or my lack of photo- harmonia that Shostakovich had lived in fear since graphic knowledge and education. the publication of an essay in Pravda called “Muddle Disappointed, I continued nonetheless to walk the streets and to read, and it did lead me to a Instead of Music,” written in 1936 after the pre- discovery: François Arago’s famous speech announcing the invention of the daguerreotype and miere of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The Louis Daguerre’s View of Boulevard du Temple (1838), taken with a very long exposure. The people essay denounced him as a “formalist,” which in the had disappeared from Daguerre’s image except for the silhouette of a man who lifts up his foot, political climate of the time designated him as an Courtyard, Leningrad, 1975 probably to have his shoe polished. I didn’t try to imitate this photo. But I sought out more illus- Enemy of the People. Every day he expected to be trated books and catalogues of French nineteenth-century photographs, especially street scenes, arrested. At the outbreak of the war, Shostakovich participated in the city’s defense before its and I worked to improve my French. evacuation, and in the words of the official press, he “commemorated the heroism of its inhabit- Dostoyevsky was also instrumental in fostering my desire to know classical music. In his short ants in his ‘Leningrad’ Symphony.” story “White Nights,” the heroine (whom of course I fell in love with, just as the hero did) went to Shostakovich’s works reflect two experiences shared by the entire Soviet population: the the opera to listen to Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and was enchanted. I tried the experience my- Stalinist Terror and the horrors of the war. Identical musical phrases convey the exact sensa- self, and then bought a record. Little by little, I became a regular of the record shop and started to tions that the composer experienced in 1937, when the Terror reached its peak, and in 1941, familiarize myself with a broad spectrum of classical music. Vinyl records were expensive, and so which are an expression of his sentiments toward both Communism and Fascism. In Symphony were concerts. Later, by chance, when I was a student at the university, I was hired as an assistant no. 7, the “Leningrad” Symphony, isn’t the part based on the repetition of the simple melo- to the administrator of the famous Grand Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia. There was dy — often known as “the invasion theme” — as innocent at the start as it is cynical at the end? at least one concert almost every day, and because I worked in the evenings I was able to stay in Does it speak only of invasion to us? Isn’t the journey from simplicity and innocence to cynicism the hall and listen to many of them. The music sometimes created the same joy and excitement and crime a journey that was taken by both Stalin and Hitler, as well as by the dictators of our in me as did particular corners of the city. Further, music offered me an emotional dimension to own time? And more generally, doesn’t one hear the symbolic expression of evil? In this sense, everything that presented itself to my senses. It invited me to interpret things without ideological Shostakovich’s message is universal. This is what propelled me to return repeatedly to his works, color, in a more universal — a more humane and honest — way. It provided an escape from Soviet to “read” them, finally, deciphering their real sense until they became a part of myself. 16 17 To return to photography: with this underlying metaphor was clearly to be found in Dadaist photomontages. Rushing to my archive of Dosto- urge to capture happy moments, I created better yevskian photos, which I had previously found so worthless, I began to cut them with scissors photos — from the technical point of view — with a and create compositions that would succeed as a series of photomontages, eventually entitled new camera, a Soviet version of a Leica. But the re- “Leningrad from Another Side.” For the first time, these creations — rather rudimentary, to be sult, I still felt, was dull and disappointing. I began to honest — touched me, and not just me but also the bearded smokers of the photo-club. During suspect that this was caused, at least in part, by a the eighties, I continued to use the same process for a series of montages and photo collages, flaw in the composition of my brain. “Nomenklatura of Signs.” At the Kirov Cultural Palace, stubborn and persis- Not only did literature provide me with material and subjects, it also helped me discover a tent, I had begun to take classes in photojournalism, process to translate and transform an internal and purely subjective state into something more each day pushing a little further into the discipline durable and, above all, capable of being communicated to others. and “perfection” of images. There, in a nearby room, Was it possible to convey a vision by means of photography? Could photography become a a crowd of bearded men met every week, their bluish language that could articulate meaning? My response, thanks to this initial experience at the end cigarette smoke, filtered or unfiltered, invading the of the seventies, was a resounding Yes. Consequently, I decided not to abandon photography but corridors. Though a non-smoker, I was accepted a to devote my life to it by enrolling in the Faculty of Film and Photography at the local university to year later as a full-fledged member of this “institu- pursue a master’s degree. tion,” a photo-club called “Zerkalo” (Mirror). Intense immersion in my studies, coupled with a job at the Philharmonia and the encounter Collage, Leningrad from Another Side series, 1978 What mattered most to the members of Zerk- with the first love in my life, obliged me to put aside my artistic projects and concentrate on get- alo — an intelligentsia of musicians, engineers, doc- ting my diploma.