On the Waves : photo book pre-print
Preface
Dedicated to my father and everyone we lost in the waves.
This is a story about life. Mainly about life in 2020 during the world war with a new invisible enemy and its waves - virtual or real, natural or artificial, ferocious or manageable - there are many opinions and I have no interest in digging up the truth, because my narrative conveys very different idea.
The main part of my photo story is devoted to Italy, neither because it was the first EU country hit by the storm nor because the hit was the hardest, but because the Life itself decided so and I came here not long before the start of the tragedy and then returned to stay in the midst of it.
At first in the fall of 2019 I was in Campania on one of its marvellous Neapolitan coasts in Sorrento - the city celebrated in an immortal song “Caruso” by Lucio Dalla. Then in Umbria - the “green heart” of Italy and birthplace of St. Francis.
On the way to Italy there were other countries and even continents, but they are present in this story not for the manifestation of my idea, but rather to preserve the chronology of events, increase the contrast and provide different perspective. And over the course of 2020 more Italian cities and regions were added to the palette of my picture because after all “All of Europe is for watching, but Italy is for living”, - said Nikolai Gogol who lived in Italy for several years and found here the inspiration to finish his famous story “The Greatcoat".
And so the key word in this story is Life.
The “waves” were not able stop its kaleidoscope filled with faces, emotions, kisses, hugs, competitions, feasts, music, light and free spirit. The “waves” made it vividly clear that Life will still continue on this planet as long as there is pure reason and love, which exists in all its manifestations: to people or objects, nature and animals, air and sky, babies and kids, to sports or leisure, lovemaking, crafts, habits, books, arts, music, food and everything else that is the Life itself!
Life will keep its infinite movement in spite of all obstacles and this is the narrative of my story.
N.B. Description, titles and other texts in this book are written in three languages: Russian, Italian and English.
Presented only in English here to keep consistency of the website.
Cover photo
"Love, Blast and the Last" is a staged photo. You can even think of it as a still from a fiction film. In a good film, as in human life, love and farce and tragedy always go hand in hand. And in human life, like in a film, you are never sure what every plot twist will result in over time.
This work was staged and shot in the lovely Giardino Giusti – the second paradise on earth, according to the English traveller Thomas Coryat, who introduced the Italian culture of using fork to his countrymen in the early 17th century. The garden itself is located in Verona, revered thanks to Shakespeare as the city of pure, powerful, but tragic love.
In the summer of 2018, when this work was created and even in the fall of 2019, when, among the others, it was exhibited in Trieste, Italy at URBAN19 festival, the whole tragic farce played out in the frame was just a joke. An empty garden, eternal cypresses, two "bodies" and the "last" man in a gas mask with a flower in his hands, which there is no one to give to but a beautiful statue. A flower as a symbol of love and life, a gas mask as a symbol of survival and a ludicrous question in the air: “To live alone in this luxurious garden in a gas mask surrounded only by the statues? Is this life?”
When just a few months later the streets in Italy became empty and everyone put on masks, the bitter irony of my work became almost the truth of life, and the work itself turned into an allegory.
I'm sure that during that time almost everyone had asked oneself: "Is this life?"
