Family Album

Statement

Рус / ENG

Have you ever noticed how it is interesting to look at the pictures of our grandparent taken 50 years ago? People were different that time. The whole world was different and the photographers depicted reality in a different way.

These 50-years-old pictures are interesting for us not just because there are our relatives in them, but also because we can see some parts of a different reality that will never come back. Clothes, everyday life objects, interiors and landscapes of those times attract so much attention and interest. That’s characteristic for a human being to compare one thing with another, so looking at the old pictures of our relatives we begin comparing the past with the present. Many things are not as they used to be: relatives grew old, some of them died, interiors and landscapes changed, but we still catch a likeness with our own reality. This comparison is the most important. It is more important than the fact that the pictures show us the ordinary people and banal things which those people were surrounded by every day and which they probably never noticed.

50 years later a lot of things will also change. Maybe not cardinal, but some features of people and their world will surely become unaccustomed for the contemporary. A kettle will most likely stay a kettle and will continue performing its duties, but it will cease being such as we know it today. And our descendants looking at the pictures taken by us will compare our world with their own one. They will try to find something familiar in our reality, will wonder at our appearance, will envy us for what we had that they don’t, will rejoice at what they have that we didn’t.

My project simply titled «Family Album» is directed to save a piece of our today's reality for a man of the future with a help of pictures of one big family, my family. I reckon not only my blood kin among family members but also all people that I met on my way and that I see to be bearers of the characteristic features of our epoch. What is also important for me is that my descendants will see my reality in the light of my own artistic vision, and maybe just for a moment but still they will be touched by my feelings and worries, they will be able to feel ideas that I put into my works. The artist himself is also a representative of the epoch and the way future generations apprehend it depends completely on him. I suppose that working on this project will take not a year or two, but probable decades or even my whole life.

Krasnoyarsk, Russia

2011