Igor Manko
© Igor Manko, 30 Years Later (Selfportrait), 1990
About The Artist:
Igor Manko (b. 1962) was one of the Gosprom group artists in the 1980’s. Along with straight black and white imagery he used a special technique where an overexposed print was consecutively processed in two or three chemical color intensifiers. The resulting images, while following the hand-colored Kharkiv photography pattern, were more subtle and unpredictable in color delivery.
Tatiana Pavlova in her essay (2015) says: “The Abandoned Garden and Childhood Memories, two photographic series by Igor Manko, heralded the second wave of the Kharkiv photo school.” Childhood Memories “largely centers around the “mother and child” imagery. However, the playful child is actually not the artist, but his son, and the child’s mother is not the mother of his memories. The pictures depict family scenes at a countryside cottage, where Igor Manko spent his childhood. But the name of the series prevents it from being merely a broadcast of events; it places a lens in front of the viewer, which transforms the picture and places the focus of impression squarely in the past. The image of the son is the focal point in this retrospective fantasy. It draws the author’s ego, the source of his memories. The nostalgic atmosphere, so important in awakening memories, is created through the classic technique of photo “aging,” making it sepia-toned. The pictures look worn with age. Like faded memories, they erase the line between real and make-believe; father and son are no longer simply similar, they become identical, all differences washed away. All this is achieved through “straight” photography. (...)
(above image: © Igor Manko, Swallow)
“The Abandoned Garden serves as a twin to Childhood Memories. The rich flora and the typically wide open spaces of countryside gardens, the lack of any fences or markers delineating properties—all this prevents us from identifying the subject matter of Igor Manko’s pictures as the Garden of European tradition. These images contain a distinct Eastern flavor, a Borgesian context wherein the illusionary garden with “vanishing” or “divergent” paths follows laws entirely different from those of botany or agriculture. It is the “abandoned garden” of childhood memories.”
Portfolios
View Portfolios: Abandoned Garden 1987
View Portfolios: Landscape with Flying Helicopter 1990
View Portfolios: Memories of Childhood 1988
View Portfolios: Town Motifs with Clouds 1986
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