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Remedios is a cuban village near Santa-Clara, famous for its fireworks festival – Las Parrandas.  It is happening in December for just one night, when within eight to ten hours a stock of fireworks is shot out, which was amassed within the preceding year.

The idea is that two neighborhoods compete in performances, which have a slight theatrical and a massive firework part. The winner is always friendship.

Fireworks used are of small “hand” type and large “cannon” type. Some do not burn to the end and fall from the night sky onto the heads of the crowd – for this reason the locals favor large hats for this night. Those who do not light fireworks themselves, just watch the others, half-deaf of the shooting noise.

And the photographer watches the ones who watch.

“A Night in Remedios” Gallery

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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.

“White Nights” Gallery

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A photographer can “dig” inside the others and inside himself. To look inside the others can be eventually helped by making their portraits, and to look inside yourself – by writing your diary. If you do both things in parallel, you can get a strange mix of the open and the hidden, of what you actually saw and what was there in your head concerning what you saw.

“The Pushkar Scrapbook” was made at one of the biggest camel fairs in the world, among hordes of tourists – who made you dream of a visual isolation.

Making portraits, I was very close to people, and as I cannot speak their language, we were sharing the whole by means of sight. In these moments it was important for me to step away from the disturbing surroundings with the ones who were photographed and to be alone in the frame.

While making a scrapbook like a diary, I was trying to reconstruct the atmosphere in a more controlled, but also a more subjective mode, using the widely spread elements of Indian visual culture: woodblock printing, drawings – including those of traditional culture animals, stickers, postcards, drips of paint, my own sketches of Pushkar, stamps, flowers and leaves – all those were assembled on colored paper with some author’s notes on what was up day to day.

“The Pushkar Scrapbook” in the portrait part tries to look at local people isolated from their surroundings, and as a scrapbook it shows how a stranger imagines what is around – superficially, but colorful.

“The Pushkar Scrapbook” Gallery

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