Since 2006 I am coming to St. Petersburg to photograph «Scarlet Sails» feast of the secondary school graduates. During these two nights the density of street life in St.Pete reaches the level of South-East Asia. Light is dreamlike, and the sleep is all gone amidst crazy people, encounters, embracing, parting, love and drive of just a drunk party.
Everything has already been photographed, but should possible repetition stop the photographer?.. Joseph Brodsky wrote, that death is what happens to the other. The paraphrase could sound «photography is what happens to yourself».
The foreword to one of Robert Doineau’s albums is called «Lessons of the Street». I guess the street has been also my greatest teacher. It is impossible to teach how to deal with reportings, portraits or landscapes. The chance to see is independent of particular genre: the mystery of any artist is in the first place not his technique, but a different trajectory of his thought and eye.
This very mistery cannot be learnt directly, but rather must develop itself. A photographer has both an input and an output: as an output we see the image, and as an input we have the rest – a collection of moments and experiences. One can get any kind of wisdom as an input, but one never knows exactly what the output will be like.
While photographing, I stick to the chaos theory, where anything can happen any time. Photography is for me a way to understand something or at least to ask a question. As an observer, I feel that images occasionally trapped by us, never actually belong to us.
Perhaps, this is why repetition does not really matter.
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