Saturday 9 June 2012

solitary solipsism

I just came across Alexey Titarenko, a photographer from Leningrad who has made a series of haunting, unsettling images that simultaneously imply claustrophobia and isolation.

alex

“der Körper ist eine dünne Haut über mühsam unterdrücktem Wahnsinn”
{our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness}
Im Westen Nichts Neues / All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque

The series is called ‘City of Shadows’’ and was shot in the year I was born and the two years following. If you want to see more of his work, you can follow this link.

Photography is powerful. This photograph is strong. It makes you think.

It makes you think about how you are so unique and individual and profound. Everything you feel you feel fully, you think so fast you think a thousand thoughts a day, images and expectations and concerns flashing through your head. What freaks me out is that every person is like that. Every single person. Look at all the people in that photograph. They’re not nondescript cold Russians. They’re all self-contained universes, each of us is. And look how many pass by, just in the time it took for this photograph to be taken. Maybe an hour or so. Too many to conceptualise. Too many to see distinctly. So many that they become transparent. How can we be sure other people really exist?

It makes you think how absurd it is that you can have so many people around, can be surrounded by other complex beings, a see of sentience, but still feel so lonely.

I’m falling in love with photography. It has such an incredible ability to shape perception of reality, and really, that’s all reality is. Perception.

signature

1 comment:

Any comments?