The first high-profile exhibition opened after quarantine in St. Petersburg, the exhibition “a Different view. Portrait of a country in the lens of Magnum” in the Central exhibition hall “Manege”. From the archive of a great Agency, we selected 250 photographs taken in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation since the inception of the Agency in 1947 until the most recent days before the shooting coronavirus in hospitals of Moscow 2020. Home studied the columnist of “Kommersant” Kira Dolinina.The first photographer from the Agency appeared in the USSR at the end of July 1947, two months after the formation of the Agency. And that was Robert Capa, already great, like the other two Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour. All five of them, and they came up with the world’s first photo Agency to protect its copyright and to have the opportunity to choose where to go and what to shoot. The latest photo photographer Magnum in Russia is the story of Nanna Hitman of the 52-th Moscow hospital this spring. It was not decades, to have someone from the Agency did not come here.Shot different: the post-war ruins and ballet schools, farms and parades, doing portraits of the great and little people, arranged a fashion session in the streets of Leningrad and Crimean embankments, walking trails heroes of the film “I step through Moscow” and traveled on trains in the Siberian towns and villages. Russian photographer during all these seventy-odd years in the Magnum was (and is) only one — Gueorgui pinkhassov, but the Russian theme was strong.Magnum from the very first day was filmed where it was acutely important, symbolic, very often dangerous. Perfect photodocumentation was the stated purpose in establishing the Agency, despite the fact that it saw the founding fathers different. The genius of the form of Cartier-Bresson insisted on the software involved, to hover above the fray for the sake of his “decisive moments” and objectivity. Capa stepped on a bloody ground the entire foot and clicked his camera’s shutter as a bolt action rifle, sometimes not even looking through the viewfinder. They of life will go away as the antipodes — Capa undermine a mine in Vietnam, Seymour will kill the machine-gun fire in Egypt, and Cartier-Bresson dies in his bed in Provence, before the age of one hundred and five years.This difference in views and attitudes is the key to crazy success Magnum. And the current exhibition including. There is no single Russia itself, the main character here — a time and a place. And history. Country of poverty and wealth (which is the photo of the interior stuffed with Antiques eyeballs apartments Leo Kassil, made by Inge morath in 1965); black and red (the finest made series Bruno Barbie, who directed the Moscow of the 1960s, which has one color — red flag); the lyrical and brutal; Imperial village; public and personal, finally.Kura��’or exhibition Nina Gomiashvili in the comments for the exhibition he said: “when I began to take in the archive of Magnum photos, was afraid that will be a lot of “horror mode””. Read as “and they were not”. Indeed, the selection is made so that it seems to be talking more about clean pictures and happy daily life. However, the photos much more than I would like to invest in them is fundamentally fashionable and apolitical curators. Almost everyone who makes an exhibition of Soviet art or about art, about the Soviet took as a good tone only talk about the sublime, artistic freedom, art for art’s sake. Supposedly the story we already know, and now let’s look at how it was interesting and beautiful.But the material is never given, and viewers are not fools. The country that with the obvious sympathy of the professional photojournalists were shooting master Magnum, can not be without “the horrors of the regime.” Abandoned villages, the terrible poverty, toilets on the streets, dull buildings, endless queues, children toe the line, the eternal Lenin’s profile where no hitting, and people… Know what these 250 pictures, nearly no? Smiles. No, of course, was the thaw and perestroika, the people were laughing and laughing. But you have to be a foreigner, or too long to live in the West, to see what smiles like those in subway and railway stations, in queues and in museums, even beaches and parks less than average in the civilized world. “Terror regime” here is that this country is gloomy and distrustful of people. We know and without Magnum know, but with photo Agency these phobias become a standard document. And this document is truthful and good in every way.
