Guennadi Maslov
© Igor Manko, Guennadi Maslov (1986)
About The Artist:
This is how Guennadi Maslov (b. 1959) describes his initiation into photography: “My father would cover the kitchen windows with dark blankets and put the enlarger and processing trays on the table where normally we had our meals. I am 7 and I am bored. The photos are small and take forever to dry.” By the late 1970’s he was already part of the photography art movement in Kharkiv, but it wasn’t until the mid-1980’s that his work became recognized within the community.
Before moving to the US in 1993 Maslov had belonged to a number of Kharkiv photography groups (from Kharkiv Photo Club in the late 1970’s to Gosprom group in 1986), he denies being a part of the Kharkiv School or even the mere existence of such. The basis for this intriguing twist in The Kharkiv School of Photography project can be found in his beautifully written essay The Kharkov Burst (link to essay-). There Maslov claims that Kharkiv photographers “never had a common (let alone concrete) aesthetic ground...Was there anything artistically common between merciless documentaries of Mikhailov and the hand-painted psychological satires by Pavlov and Shaposhnikov? Hardly, except perhaps the shared cultural undertone and the energy of talent,”
Educated as a linguist, Maslov defines the connection between image and word in a poetic way “My work is a translation. It is an attempt to translate the poetry of memories and dreams into the verse of photography -- an attempt to catch the fluid material of the subconscious, and put it on a somewhat more stable base of photographic paper.”
'There is no pain here' claims Boris Mikhailov, criticizing Maslov's work at the discussion table after the Ukrainian Time exhibition (the ArtHouse Gallery, Kharkov, September 2012). And he is right. Maslov’s (as well as the majority of the Gosprom group artists) aesthetic grounds deviated from the “merciless documentaries” of their predecessors in search of finer compositional arrangements and more philosophical attitudes. For Maslov they stem from the Lithuanian photography of the 1980’s and the work of Alexander Sliusarev, the head of the so-called Moscow ‘metaphysical photography school’.
Maslov’s images are sometimes spiced with a sprinkling of absurdity and grotesqueness so characteristic of the life in post-communist societies. The author's irony is easily recognizable in the haiku caption found in his recently published photo book (Guennadi Maslov. Ukrainian Time, 2013, Hanna House Books) which could serve as the motto to all the Kharkiv artists’ work of the 1985 - 2000 period:
Hey, Socialism, old fellow!
Burning down so quietly?
So silently after all?
Portfolio: Untitled
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