"Once photography enters your bloodstream, it is like a disease."
- Anonymous
"It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head."
Henri Cartier-Bresson
I agree with the first statement. And with the second one too. But I would say even shorter: "The camera sees through your eyes."
Yesterday I received a letter from Sergey Reshetnikov, a friend of mine from the Youth Adventure Club. He had looked at my work on the website Viewbug.com .
I've also sent him my double compositions from the series "SIGNS ON ASPHALT", beginning of this century.
Sergey Reshetnikov is a journalist, a writer and a University Professor.
Sergey Reshetnikov: "Yes, your work is very interesting. Now I understand how you wrote your book about Grant Aleksandrovich - you put it together like a photo album.
https://nashasreda.ru/tur-klub-deti-kapitana-granta/
http://old.phys.huji.ac.il/~golos/.pdf
After seeing your work, one begins to think in a new way - frame by frame. This is a bit like today's "clip thinking" of the young people, although the cognitive root here, is different, I gather. I used to work as a literary editor for a couple of years, reviewing the manuscripts of modern writers. Women's prose very often has a common drawback - it is difficult for women to link together narrative scenes, which are usually bright in themselves, as a result, the plot crumbles. But you are willfully raising this feminine feature of thinking to a special "artistic style", inventing something like "a pictorial pointillism". And, actually, why not? It turns out to be really interesting. Only, yes, it does leave crumbles in your head.
So, what can you choose from these fragments?
You get used to the fact that the earth and sky are mixed up pretty quickly. How to treat this and what is behind it? Yes, it is obviously worth it that they are mixed.
Everything is blazing: water, glass, stone. Even the snow tree burns with its snowy flame.
With a simple tilt of the camera, street lights, caps of household lamps, domes of cathedrals, entire streets and cities - everything rushes to an unknown destination, beyond the horizon. Such a tilt usually occurs on bends, and the viewer feels pressed into the chair.
Shooting from the window of playgrounds today painfully refers to the filming done from combat drones.
Your camera doesn't just crave a miracle from the mundane reality, it fiercely demands it from it. The mundane is clearly in debt to you, although it is already learning a little.
Okay, that's it for now, thanks for the tour, I have to get up early tomorrow, I'll go to Tver to visit a school friend, he doesn't speak after a stroke and doesn't move well. And he was a military sailor, although, it would be more correct to say, he's remained so.
And your works - well done!"
Sincerely,
Reshetnikov S.N.
January 16, 2024
My answer. Letter 1.
It is interesting to hear such an opinion.
I don't even know what to say. I liked the metaphor of feeling pressed into the chair.
As for the shooting from a drone - this is new to me. I was shooting from my 9th floor, seeing abstraction, not military objects... My impressions these days are scarce....
I cooperate with reality, learn from it, take what suits me. As Yann Arthus-Bertrand said, "The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness." Right! What can we do! Everything has already been created! "You just have to live and life will give you pictures" - the very same Bresson. We only capture a moment of nature or of the material world - through the vision given to us from Above. And not we - the camera does it, and we just click.
Who are we anyway! We don't even know what we're made of, how, where we came from, much less where we're going to... Therefore, I am in debt to reality, not vice versa.
"Your camera doesn't just crave a miracle from the mundane, it fiercely demands it from it." That's true! I need the energy of a volcano. That's why I felt so good in Kara-Dag, in Pamukkale, in the Sahara, in Montserat, in the Meteors... Unfortunately, I've never visited Belukha. I think I would have caught on there too. And the mundane - yes... It's hard...
My handwritten book is called "There is a way of the earth and a Way of Wings". The path of the earth is not my cup of tea, but the Path of the Wings is just right.
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/waydoc-2/index.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/waydoc-2.shtml
And then it becomes clear why two of my three works at the Incheon Metropolitan City Contest in South Korea were turned upside down.
While it should be like this:
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/102338917
In fact, Mr. Yoo just didn't get it was a reflection in the windscreen of the car, and made it more ordinary.
But this one is amazing - against all the laws of physics.
While it captures the florescences of an ash tree. And, in my opinion, it looks much better in the normal format:
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/100882485
In addition, if you zoom in, the picture looks like a pastel painting. It happened by accident. I didn't think about it when I was filming.
Anyway all the 3 works received awards...
When I exhibit with artists, I can still qualify for prizes, but on Viewbug.com, despite all the awards from moderators and fellow photographers on the site, I thought I would never win a competition - there are such panoramic shots, including those made from drones, the profi photographers make great studio pictures. And me... I'm only trying to create works of art with the help of not the most technically advanced camera, but the only one I can shoot with... and my favorite...
And suddenly... I am selected as a Contender for a Contest...
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/102086480
And they also write all sorts of commendable things...
Monument to Maya Plisetskaya, the great ballerina, in the square named after her in Central Moscow.
Contender in the Photography Awards at Viewbug.com. Art photo - Olga Slobodkina-von Br;mssen
Good news olgaslobodkinavonbromssen, We are delighted to recognize your extraordinary talent. Your photo has been selected as a Contender in the VIEWBUG Photography Awards. Your photograph stood out among many others, and that's awesome.
?
Here you can see Maya better:
However, I have already been chosen to be a Contender with my IRIS. But I forgot.
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/101415124
And again I entered the top 10% of the best photographers in the world... Like in 2022. Na-yeah... It's hard to believe.
The storyboard is also in. But that's more or less where I started. Things are a little different now, but that's probably what's left.
As for "crumbles"... I'm actually trying to harmonize, but, apparently, there is nothing to seal the internal gaps...
Thanks for the interesting article.
With your permission, I would post it in the lit.lib.ru at my page - along with my answer.
And here's what the best and most famous art critics of Moscow, William Meyland and Natella Voiskunskaya, write about me.
And although 20 years have passed since then, it looks as if nothing is outdated... Neither my works of those times, nor these texts.
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/exhibitdoc.shtml
About the gender... I'm not very good at this. I understand - talented/mediocre, intellectual/dumb, boring/exciting, etc. While male and female... Well, there's probably something to it... In any case, not the way we were taught back in the Soviet times - that there is no difference between town and country, floor and ceiling, man and woman... but only between Marxism-Leninism and the machinations of imperialism...))) Joke!
Thanks for the "special artistic style" and "picturesque pointillism". However, I don"t quite understand what I should start linking by my feminine essence urgently ...?))) I have single works, series and compositions. There are whole exhibitions, i.e. displays connected by theme, color, etc. There are collections...
Oh! I remember how I had an experiment with my students and just acquaintances. I gave them 10 poems from Japanese poetry - for them to guess the gender: who wrote it - a man or a woman. No one guessed, except for one English teacher. For some reason, she immediately realized who was who. I wonder if you can guess ...))) For the purity of the experiment, I also gave my own poem... She read it and said, "I don't know. Probably, a monk wrote it..." Wise woman!
One playwright (from Koktebel) also indulged in speculating about male and female poetry. As a result, he gave out: "Marina Tsvetaeva wrote male poetry." Yeah, aaaaaah...
It's hard to imagine more feminine poetry. Apparently, he implied that bad poetry is written by women and good poetry - by men.
Male chauvinism is strong in our brother here, especially in an "advanced" one...))) Westerners seem to have already realized that we are more than equal.
As Ira Golitsyna says: "And a man doesn't have to be very smart, otherwise it will already be a woman."))) But this is - ssh! hush!!! Between us, girls.
One of our mutual friends, when he read my book "Youth Adventure Club", he wrote to me: "Only one comma is missing there, the rest is OK. You must have had an A in Russian at school"... (???) At school? Of course, I had an A in both Russian and literature. But if it were just school, it would be half the trouble. That's what you have to make do with now:
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/about.shtml
However, Joseph Brodsky was not a male chauvinist. Such a level can no longer suffer from chauvinism. Joseph considered Tsvetaeva the best poet (not a poetess!) of the 20th century.
As for me, I prefer Mandelstam and Akhmatova, but this is just to my liking.
Tsvetaeva's poetics is an extraordinary phenomenon. The construction of her poetic sheet is striking, especially in dramatic works. I watched "Phaedra" at the Pushkin Theater, then was reading the text for a long time...
And what Brodsky wrote to me still holds me. The point is - don't be afraid to be yourself! Great!!!
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/waydoc-2/index.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/waydoc-2.shtml
I'm listening to Vivaldi! It's brilliant! And completely out of gender. There is universal tenderness, subtlety, spirituality in this music...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75MEfUuMO70
Anyway, to be honest, this gender issue is already annoying. Why don't we wisely switch to another topic.)))
How I made a book about Grant* - spontaneously. I just consistently registered the events of the project. (I write poetry in the same way - not knowing how I will start and how it will end. And make pictures in this way too. I photograph what I see. And that's all there is to it. In the book I also added the memoirs of the participants of those events, whom I managed to persuade to write something about those times... Besides, I really wanted to know how everything had been before my appearance in the club and in the training camp.
However, I liked it more, Seryozha, when you wrote to me that I had strung other guys' essays on the column of the narrative... And this design is my author's know-how. This fits better with my creative ego. Although I accept the metaphor with the photo album too.
Guys ...
about sixty ...
Where can we go without a rhyme -
O, my!
And that was a while
ago...
and now
we're over 60...
Isn't that fine!
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/grantdoc-1.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/grantdoc-1/index.shtml
Recently it occurred to me - funnily... When I was sending my "Art Nouveau Girl in a Cup of Coffee" to Korea (I went into my study and suddenly my eyes were glued to a cup of coffee I had finished the day before, and this image was in it. I was just stunned and immediately took a picture of her! On the next day too. I should have lacquered that Girl so that she would remain in that cup forever...), so when I was sending her it occurred to me to start a new style - Random Images. I see them everywhere. In fact, I think, the souls of the people who left this material world are trying to express themselves in this way, to reveal themselves somehow... But maybe I'm wrong...
Anyway, here is this girl:
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/94689719
And here you will find her in my editing for the competition:
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/inyazdoc/index.shtml
And I will also give you the "Warrior in the Snow":
In the next letter.
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
Letter 2:
"Everything is blazing: water, glass, stone. Even the snow tree burns with its snow flame."
I didn't quite get it. How is it burning? The inner light? Or?
Anyway, here is the "Warrior in the snow":
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/imagesdoc-1.shtml
And also, when I participated in the Fantapia Museum in Korea last year, I made a mistake and wrote not "Mascaron", but "Macron" - the name of my work. I had to come up with the idea that this is a blending of "Mascaron" and "Macron". "Macron" is a macroparticle, that is us, embodied macroparticles of Our Creator's Imagination. In addition, there was such a tribe - the Macrones. But that doesn't seem to fit in.
Okay, I'll go and try to get some sleep too if I can.
Thanks for the food for the mind!
ASAP is my "Girl in a Cup" (2021) for the Contest.
Letter 3:
P.S. One of my relatives, when she became friends with me at FB, gave this comment:
"You photograph in such a way - it's inconvenient to watch. I, for example, center everything."
I replied to her: "Picasso also mastered realistic painting technique. Well, he could paint normally, hm? Could he not!"
She wrote: "I understand this is a joke"?
Well, a joke or not a joke. Maybe a hoke?)))
That's it!
Good night...
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
Letter 4:
P.P.S. My eldest nephew, when he was little, came up with a song. He called it a "Joke", but he still could not pronounce "J", so it turned out - "Hoke".
And then I wrote a series of "Hoke poems" - humorous, partly creepy.
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/jokepoemsdoc.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/jokedoc.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/fromthejokedoc.shtml
A blending again.
This is from English. - breakfast + lunch = brunch. And a branch is a branch.
Branch, on a branch, on a branch,
none of them free...
Here's one! Climb higher!
And yet it breaks down.
And only the one over there, above all,
bends into a lyre.
Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus in my translation:
The first part. Sonnet 17
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/sonnets1partonedoc.shtml
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
Letter 5:
Recently, I accidentally opened one of Chagall's websites and immediately immersed myself in his extraordinary world, although the paintings were in the background, and in the foreground was his amazing portrait. I love him so much! His whole fantasy world is in his face, which makes you want to watch it endlessly...
When I came to The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts for his exhibition in the late 80s, I was physically pushed from picture to picture. They are not just imaginative, they are spiritual, like icons. Only in a different way.
And take Evgeny Rastorguev. I wrote about him in The Moscow Tribune or The Moscow Times in the mid-90s.
Chagall is illuminated, Rastorguev "centers things".
While both portray the world of little men. But, of course, it was Chagall who opened it for us. And not for us, he just painted his mind...
Am listening to instrumental music. Well, I can make sense of Grieg - "Pergunt". Norwegian folk motifs etc. But Wagner... Prelude to the opera "Tristan and Isolde"... He also wrote the libretto himself. And the " Ring of the Nibelung" is unspeakable! Over 100 instruments, male and female choir... etc.
"Oh, my God! How small I am!
This rock is floating - without a sail, without oars,
Obscuring half the sky..."
I have to put myself in quotes...
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
Letter 6:
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/facesonbuildingsdoc.shtml
MASCARON/MACRON)))
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
The night of January 16-17, 2024
***
Today I added some more:
Seryozha, I wrote to you, I got so carried away - even my pains were gone. Or did I forget about them - I dissolved them with a creative flow...
"Not lambada, but lumbago...
Sciatica and not Shiraz.
Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ!
Have some mercy on us!"
I'm quoting myself again. I wrote this last summer, but didn't download it - who needs these diseases! I'd be glad to get rid of them myself!
I'll give you my CDs - poems with music. As my sponsor said, these discs can serve as relaxing psychotherapy in mental clinics and for the healthy people - you can listen to them in the car...
Not that I'm trying to convert everyone to a new faith - contemplative poetry, but I must distribute them. Worthy things. Judging from my own drone, of course.
As for my new style... RANDOM IMAGE ART - The art of random images. Oh! I have created my own new direction in art...
These seemingly random images can be serious, funny, scary. I delete the scary ones - they get into your system and start working like evil forces. But my "Girl in the Cup" is harmless. "Caterpillar" and "Warrior" too. Well, since I've come up with such a direction, I'll continue it, and then - who knows...
I've already talked about it... Once I was asked about my double compositions, if I know how I would connect them when I'm photographing...
"I don't know anything -
just go and take some pix..."
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/may28doc.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/may28doc/index.shtml
By association, Chagall/Rastorguev I recalled the exhibition of Albert Marquet at the Museum of Private Collections and his followers in Russia.
They shouldn't have put Rybchenkov and Mavrina out with him. When you look at them separately, you can somehow hypnotize yourself, but when you are lifted up by the revelations of Marche, and then you enter the hall with his followers, you knock on the ground.
But our Surikov, Korovin and Serov, if they do not surpass the French, then at least they are not inferior to them:
"Oh, the motley background of the great Impressionists!
Our Surikov, Korovin and Serov are part of them
as I can see it now...
Hawthorn in a caftan blue fur coat...
She bows before Morozova,
the boyar,
in all the gloom of the humility philosophy.
But not the fullness of her alien soul
moves me into the outer Space of Non-Existence,
but the bright color of her weighty sleeves,
a mottled background, which means nothing,
While it is everything for me
Like this clear warm day
In the September autumn.
Oh, Indian summer!"
The confrontation is, of course, not about the nationality or the place of residence on the Earth, but only - talent /mediocrity, revelation/"centration".
Although Talent, of course, carries the national traits. Grieg's music contains legends about trolls, Komitas's - Armenian folk dances while our beloved Rachmaninov is saturated with Russian spiritual chants.
I would also like to write instrumental music, but time... time is warning out... Therefore, for now, only my songs:
https://art-rosa.ru/files/open/aid-51
Do I have the earth and the sky mixed up? Not mixed up, connected...
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/99759291
I've always tried to achieve the impossible... but... I don't have a drone. So I fly on clouds making steep turns and take pictures of the Earth as I see it from a height... And, thanks to the camera (an ingenious invention), I have created my own virtual world... By chance...
It would be nice to go into it one day... But no... I will go Where Those Who sent me here will direct me. It's up the Them to decide... and me... - who am I...
January 17, 2024
See you in the Ex-Libris Cafe! If I can go... But if I can't, remember to mention Valera. October 12. Last year was 5 years since he is gone. This date is also Sir Vitaly's birthday.*
_______________________________________________________
*Grant Alexandrovich Genzhentsev (1913-1983) - one of the whales of youth adventure movement in this country, the creator of the school of instructors and the Youth Adventure Club "The Children of Captain Grant", from where we are all coming ...
http://lit.lib.ru/img/s/slobodkina_o/grantdoc-1/index.shtml
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/grantdoc-1.shtml
* Valera Kozhin:
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/valeridoc.shtml
(Many photographs can be attached to this essay. Natalia Kuzmina has some at fb.)
*Vitaly Sapogov. See my essay "When a friend leaves."
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/vitsapdoc.shtml
Seryozha, these are the double compositions that were at my exhibitions in Korea last year:
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/95843806
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/95843777
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/95843761
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/95843742
With all my best wishes,
Olga Slobodkina
And although after my exhibition in our Palace of Creativity you demanded that I should make a video in Russian and explain each work separately - for friends, then you still wrote to me that the author's know-how remains unclear. I don't know how to explain it myself.
I think, the moderators at Viewbug.com gave the best definition of all: "your uncanny knack" - "supernatural ability", when they gave me an award, I don't remember which one...
And how do you like this?
It echoes your "Yeti" in the sense that people never believe the truth.
http://proza.ru/2006/02/10-268
I reread it. Laughed at every phrase.
- Man, stop it! - they hushed Grezin.)))
(Oh, our "gender" address - A Man! A woman! As soon as I get off the plane in the West or in a third country and hear: "Oh, Madam!"... I want to straighten up and live up to the title...)
Thanks for the story!!! The tone of the narration reminded me a little of "The lightest boat in the world." I was given this book by Nikolai Silis. Silis and Lemport were two sculptors from the Sixties. They had a workshop where interesting famous people of those times gathered. They were friends with Yuri Koval, the author of "The Boat", and I even got a signed copy. And Koval himself... he received copies of the book, got out of the car (apparently, the publishing house tortured him, as they can and usually do) and ... had a heart attack... I didn't know him. My brother and I were enjoying the "Boat" for a long time, we quoted from it: "You ask," said the godfather, "if we knit?" I will answer frankly: yes, we do. But we are also interested to know: do you knit?))) Read it, you won't regret it! My mother was friends with Silis and Lemport through one of her fellow mathematicians, Heinrich. She recommended me to write about them when I was just starting with The Moscow Tribune. She liked Silis's "Don Quixotes".
1995
In response to the "Light Boat", I gave them my translation of S.V. Bene.
http://lit.lib.ru/editors/s/slobodkina_o/benetdoc.shtml
Silis told me, "I've analyzed your translation, every phrase is constructed correctly."
And I thought: why analyze, you should have rather read it and have fun!
I'll give a copy of it to you too. It's a cool book! I bought at OZON for an episode in the video "My creative life". I'll continue with these videos if I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQiK-t4DNCs&t=377s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipyo5GExJoI&t=1198s
I don't have copies of my own books at home. It's so great to give them away to everyone! Which is right - you can't take them with you There! So let people enjoy them here while we're all together in this world... for a short while...
I also wrote an article about their exhibition in Izmailovo. When Lemport was gone, Silis continued to work alone for a long time. My last publication about him was in Passport Magazine. December 2008. "Olya! How many years have passed!"
Art History. page 16-17.
http://www.passportmagazine.ru/article/1378 /
Some time later (exactly 10 years later...) I read about his departure from this world...
- How old was he? - Mom asked.
- 90, - I replied.
- Let him rest in peace! - Mom said... in such a tone, as if it was only right and correct, but actually to prevent me from breaking into tears...
- Good man! - said I.
January 19th, 2024
P.S. Yes, everyone ages and dies, regardless of gender and our eternal unity and the struggle of the opposites...(quoting my brother, "It's a pity women are getting old too...").
And I can't stand it anymore! Peter Brook is gone, Natasha Parry is gone, Jacques d'Amboise is gone, Grisha Nersesyan is gone... George White is 88...
Silis and Lemport are gone...
Nikogosyan and Eteri are gone...
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/nikogosyandoc-1.shtml
http://www.passportmagazine.ru/article/1474
Berlin is gone...
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/leonidberlindoc.shtml
http://www.passportmagazine.ru/article/1344 /
Illarion Golitsyn is gone...
http://lit.lib.ru/s/slobodkina_o/holidayartdoc.shtml
And other famous people of art, my favorite, who I did not know personally, but who have made my cultural background - Elizabeth Taylor, Gina, Franco Zefirelli, Vasily Lanovoy, Otar Ioseliani... I can't list them all...
The wheel of history has turned...
Richard Gere is 74. Olivia Hussey (Juliet) will be 73 in April, Leonard Whiting (Romeo) will be 74 in June...
And me... How old am I! I haven't yet managed to become a singer, an actress, a screenwriter, let alone a designer and architect...
And it was all so new, so bright, so recent!
I will keep silent about my relatives, loved ones, teachers and friends. Otherwise I'll burst into tears, then it will be difficult to come to my senses...
And yes, I need to scan and download my articles from the Tribune and the Times. They look so vintage now...
January 20, 2024
Today Grant Alexandrovich is 111 years old...
Seryozha, I realized why everything is on fire in my pix - the Sun is hitting the windows, the houses, the domes, etc. But the burning snow tree!!!
Olga Slobodkina-von Br;mssen participated in the International Art project ARTISTS IN HISTORY organized by Dr. Alessandro Costanza, President of the Costanza Fondazione, in Jan. 2024 and got a certificate and press in the New York Magazine WAVES AND RUNWAYS. https://wavesandrunways.com/about/