botic » f2.8 - Philipp Naderers Photoblog

I really like what the Rodchenko School for Photography and Multimedia in Moscow brings to the festival again. They provide their students a very solid framework where they can develop their own projects in and what strengthens their work as a whole. Here my picks from their table this year.

Danila Tkachenko was awarded with the 1st prize of World Press Photo in the category Staged Portraits Stories this year for his series »Escape«. I think WPP is always connected with a good amount of luck, but in Danila’s case it’s really a deserved reward for a great project. I only knew the series online from WPP and other features about it and was looking forward for the book since I heard that he will publish it in Peperoni Books. Since a lot of people wrote critics about the project itself, I want to focus on the order in the book. The beginning sucks you into the wild nature where the protagonists spend there life without social contacts and apart from modern / urban society. When you see the first face you stop flipping through the book – just like if you met a stranger during a long walk through a forest. Your stare at him and he stares back at you without moving, a very strange moment of silence. Every page you move on brings you a little bit closer to those men, but still you cannot identify with them. Danila shows there living in a perfectly edited sequence and did a tremendous selection of pictures for the book. It feels so right what he has accomplished. In my opinion the book could contain some more pages of „walking around through the forest“ like at the beginning. But this would also dilute the sequence and so I totally understand the final edit for this book. Also noticeable is the high quality of the printing process, achieved by the printers of Wanderer in Bad Münder. It’s simply very well printed and this adds to the success of the series. Conclusion: This is a must-have for your bookshelf, with no ifs and buts!

From photography students from Russia you expect some work dealing with the Olympic Games in Sochi last winter. »Spectator Pass« by Julia Abzaltdinova is a book which shows the changes related to the Olympic Games and also takes you a little bit backstage of the event. I really like the picture at the beginning where a bus drives over a bridge with the mountains in the background. One could read this as the bus into the world of the Olympics. Specially if you look back to Sochi with all the supercritical media coverage of German media in mind, this book stays away from separating into black and white. The focus is more on the average people than on the big profiteers of the event. It shows heavily altered nature which had to make space for ski lifts and cableways or a security net to prevent landslips. The book provides a point of view which was not presented a lot during the games in German and Austrian media. It’s a Russian spectators pass, a short trip to a monumental event taking place in a region adapted to fit into the visual expectation of winter games. Recommended for everyone interested in the Olympic Games in Sochi, with a special perspective someone might not have seen so far.

Ivan Orlov’s »A Man and the Sea« is project on the beach of the Black Sea at Primorskoye in the Odessa region. I recently discovered how much I like the life at the beach and Martin Parr’s »Life is a Beach« is one of my favorite books so far. That’s one of the reasons why I was personally very interested in this project and why I enjoyed flipping through the pages. There are some similarities in the scenes from the beach from Martin and Ivan, but Ivan’s book is strictly in black and white. He also focuses on a small stripe of the coast and documents it comprehensive way. This extensive documentation is also the big strength of this book. At the end Ivan also shares a diary with the reader which brings you deeper into the area and makes certain points clearer. And I discovered that Ivan and I share a very specific wish for vacations: Read more books and shoot better in that time.

A completely different project is »Dkdance« by Dmitry Lukianov. DKs, short for dvorets kultury (Palace of Culture), where entertainment and cultural houses in the former Soviet Union. He documented some of them in his way and with a very analytical and formal view. When I first saw the book I hoped that he also included some portraits of people working or at least hanging around in that houses – which he did and this gives the project more depth and expressiveness. Sometimes people turn into the inventory of a building after they reside there for a long time and I got that feeling for most of them. The are deeply connected to the location and you cannot move them out without taking a very important part of their life from them. Some of the houses are really abandoned and ruins, so one can only imagine how they looked in their best times. When talking with Dmitry I remembered some similar places in Austria, where cinemas and other local entertainment houses decayed in the last decades. They had their best days in the 50ies and 60ies, but since then the life at the countryside changed and a more mobile population had no usage for small local club houses anymore. So I think this development is not unique for a special region, in fact there are many places which need to be discovered and documented all over here.

A book hard to describe for me is Vera Barkalova’s »Pilgrim«, so just look at it yourself to get your own impression. Just a few words: In some parts very direct, in some kind also rude. Sexually loaded, but also violating in the next moment. Go through the book and discover it for your own. The project works very well in the context of a book, so you have to grab one for yourself! Recommended for a lot of people I know are there at the festival on Sunday.

»Iceberg« by Kirill Savchenkov was already shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award this year. And you have to take some time to go through the whole book – a lot of text is included, but it’s worth it! One will notice the paper inlays between some pages, which grabbed my attention and I like the usage of them through the whole book. It’s not a book you would expect about a skateboarder in Moscow’s suburbs. I enjoyed the visual language used and how it is combined with the text and the stories told with both. One short excerpt: „Later, awoke, I understood that she just mixed left and right up. She wanted to kiss the person on the right, but being half-asleep started kissing me. Morning after none of us showed any signs of that. She probably didn’t really remember or wanted to think that she doesn’t, and I didn’t show, so that strengthened our silence.“

I want to finish with this years students from Rodchenko Art School with a book I really enjoyed: Lilia Li-mi-yan’s »Masters – Servants«. You can read the book from two directions. If you want, start with the masters, the persons in charge. Sometimes it’s not easy to identify them as what they are to their servants, their clothes do not separate them, neither do their faces and expressions. But also some have a very strong presence in the photos, showing to us what they want us to see in them. Presenting us their opinion how we should notice them. Others show a different face and appearance, where you would not be able to say who is in which role. In the middle of the book both sides meet and are presented together. I like that idea, which works pretty well in a book and lets discover the project in three ways. How will we look on these kind of books in some years, maybe decades?

Two special mentions at the end: Alla Afonina and Vera Laponkina documented the Polytechnic Museum during its restoration phase. The project comes in a box in an edition of 70. Specially if you like technology and the Vienna Technical Museum then this book is a very interesting look into a museum in transition. The other mention goes to the winner of the first ViennaPhotoBookAward, Olga Matveeva. »Feud« is a book about her time on Crimea. It’s a short but intensive story, a collection of moments, it invites you to flip back and forth, go through it in slower steps, then speed up and catch the story behind it. Personally, I need to be in the right mood to fully enjoy such a book. As I wrote last year there is a lot of tension in her photography and you find traces of her last years book »HOME« also in her new work. So to fully get the point I highly recommend you to also look out for both books!

Special Recommendation: Marco Van Duyvendijk

My personal favorite stand in the first two floors is the one of Marco Van Duyvendijk. He is not a publisher as some expected when visiting the stand, he is a great photographer and took his books and travelled for the festival to Vienna. Visit him and look at his gorgeous book »Eastward Bound«, which show the capability for empathy of Marco. My number one book at this year’s festival, I appreciate his approach to photography and how he documented Romania and other countries in the east. He is located at Anzenberger Gallery next to Peperoni Books. Absolutely a must this year!