Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics:
Part 3 - Contemporary Photographers Exhibition 1
© Guennadi Maslov. Selfportrait
Guennadi Maslov.
Guennadi Maslov (b. 1959) describes his initiation into photography in his bioblurb: “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 (See Maslov's 1985 - 2000 work).
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.”
His recent series of complicatedly composed images photographed both in Ukraine and abroad perfectly illustrates the artist’s statement and takes the Kharkiv School black-and-white discourse further. Maslov comments: “The images were taken all over the world. I do not attach them to any particular cultural background. They are not supposed to tell a story but rather stimulate/stir analogous universal concepts in the viewer. However, I never believed that the the concept was so overly important that the esthetics should just shut up and hope for the best. That idea was the premise behind a huge amount of bad art which posed as “conceptual”.
Maslov’s work was recently published as a photobook (Guennadi Maslov. Ukrainian Time, 2013, Hanna House Books).
Portfolios
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