Courtesy of the Washington Center for Photography

Dimitry Vilensky photo from St. Petersburg.

Steppes Off the Deep End

Since the winds of perestroika began to blow communism away in 1989, Dmitry Vilensky has been a driving force on St. Petersburg's contemporary photography scene: writing articles, organizing exhibitions and creating haunting images of his beautiful, majestic and decayed hometown. That energy and vision have earned him an international reputation as one of Russia's leading fine-art photographers.

Courtesy of the Washington Center for Photography

Nikolai Bakharev's portrait of fellow Siberians.

Unfortunately, his modicum of fame has not led to financial security. A few months ago, worn down by the constant struggle to make art and ends meet in the economic and social uncertainty of the Russian Federation, the 33-year-old photographer decided a radical change was necessary. With his wife and baby, he emigrated to Germany, where he received permanent work and residency permits as a Jewish refugee.

"I enjoyed the spirit of perestroika. Right now this period of history and my own history is over. It's time to do something else. For me, it was easier to go somewhere else," says Vilensky, who has settled in Ruesselsheim, a gritty car-factory town down the Main River from Frankfurt. "In St. Petersburg, there were some favorable places in the city. Small streets, little yards with scenes of life, children playing, old people talking. Now the courtyards are full of Mercedes-Benzes and people talking on mobile phones. The old cafes that used to inspire me are closed. The spirit is really gone. It's just history now. That space doesn't exist."

Courtesy of the Washington Center for Photography

Igor Moukin's photos of fallen Soviet icons are featured in "Chronicles of Change."

Vilensky's decision to leave St. Petersburg is the most dramatic example of the changes faced by the seven Russian photographers whose work is included in the touring exhibition "Russia: Chronicles of Change," at the Washington Center for Photography at 406 Seventh St. NW.

The exhibition offers a compelling and strangely beautiful look at Russian society's difficult transition from communism to democracy. It also highlights the differences between Western art photography's slick, often vapid images and the emotional power some Russian photographers can capture using a documentary style, basic darkroom technology and black-and-white film.

"Photographers in Moscow and St. Petersburg are devoted to coming to terms with history and social reality. Their photography is more existential, less involved with conceptual ideals than Western photography," says Leah Bendavid-Val, senior editor at the National Geographic Society's book division and author of the 1991 book "Changing Reality: Recent Soviet Photography." "The photographers in this exhibition are all people who survive, who believe in photography, who are really passionate about what they do. You don't meet very many photographers over there who are jaded."

Under communism, most of the photographers in the exhibition were not allowed to show their work in state-controlled galleries or publications, but basic photo supplies, such as black-and-white photographic paper and darkroom chemicals, were readily available and inexpensive. In the market economy, photo supplies and everything else cost much more, and while there are no official restrictions on what work can be shown, there aren't that many galleries.

Although contemporary Russian photographers have won some significant exhibitions at home, they have enjoyed far greater popularity in Western Europe and in the United States, where a number of major shows of post-Soviet photography have been staged since 1991.

Courtesy of the Washington Center for Photography

Andrey Chezhin's portraits replace faces with objects.

"Chronicles of Change" showcases the works of Vilensky as well as Andrey Chezhin, Ljalja Kuznetsova, Igor Moukin, Alexey Titarenko, Nikolai Bakharev and Yevgeni Mokhorev. All the photographs in the exhibit are black-and-white. The show was organized by the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona Beach Community College in Florida and was curated by Lucian Perkins, a Washington Post photographer who has worked extensively in Russia.

Perkins went to Russia in 1988 to cover a summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and ended up spending a month there; in 1993, he got to know a number of photographers during a six-month stay.

"What really grabbed me was the passion in their work," Perkins says. "You can really tell that they care about their subjects and the photographs. It's a way of life for a lot of them. That kind of commitment really inspired me. It refueled the passion in my own work. And the quality was so amazing. I'd never seen anyone use time-lapse photography as well as Titarenko, just to give one example."

One of the Russian photographers' strengths is that they had so little equipment to work with that they learned to use what they had very effectively, Perkins adds. "In the United States, we have so much technology available to us as photographers that you don't really have to master every aspect, and the result is that no one has a style anymore, everything looks pretty much the same."

The works in "Chronicles of Change," representing seven fairly distinct styles, are straightforward by American standards. Bakharev, for example, takes portraits of people in Novokuznetsk, the Siberian city where he lives. Bakharev takes his subjects on their own terms, letting them decide how they want to pose. It is deceptively simple, honest work in which the subjects reveal their psychological state, their hopes, dreams and delusions in a time of upheaval and uncertainty.

The dramatic changes in Russia are particularly evident in the work of Moscow-based Moukin, whose photo essay "Researching of Soviet Monumental Art" shows before-andafter pictures of statues and busts of the demigods of communism. In a number of cases since the fall of communism, sculptures have simply been knocked off their pedestals, given a few whacks with a sledgehammer and cast aside. Moukin's work has an unsettling, eerie quality, like looking at a photograph of a town hit by a tornado.

It is also an example of American culture's waxing influence on Russian art. Where older Russian photographers often sought to emulate Soviet-era masters like Boris Miklayhlov, whose photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993, Moukin lists American photographers -- Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and even Lou Reed -- as his influences.

Using darkroom techniques that have been largely replaced by computer technology in this country, Chezhin, another St. Petersburg photographer, has a series of portraits in the exhibit in which his subjects' faces have been replaced by objects. His approach is low-tech and labor-intensive, and typifies the time, thought and energy that the photographers put into their work.

"Each image probably took him a few days to produce, and a photo lab in this country could do it in three hours," says Colby Caldwell, a Washington-based photographer who visited Russia in 1995 and was deeply impressed by the contemporary photography he saw there. "But it would never have the same raw power. What's so appealing about these guys' work is the honesty and the depth of feeling. It doesn't have that arch, ironic edge that a lot of postmodern photography has. There's a balance between the subject and viewer. No one is being made fun of, there is no inside joke; they are really concerned about what is going on in their country."

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