Marat Safin – Camapa (2017)
This image has been shuffled around in queue for more than a month.
Initially, I wanted to focus on Safin’s knack for consistently presenting the women with whom he works–regardless of whether or not they acknowledge the camera/viewer–as reveling (for lack of a better word) in their own femininity; since, you know: that is the one consistent piece in his work.
This rapidly degenerated into a morass of attempting to balance an unbalance-able equation of problematics to virtue, however.
Next, I figured it was damn time I called out Brooke Shaden again–seriously her work is fucking inexcusably god awful. (The connective tissue being how both use over-the-top post-process intervention to justify their images’ existence. On the one hand, Shaden guilelessly embraces the Lynchian conflation of the grammar of surreality with the grammar of the oneiric–not that Lynch is inherently bad, it would just be better if more folks considered his work as a cautionary tale warning against any sort of casual and/or unconsidered aping of his style. Safin’s manipulation are similarly egregious but they integrate holistically with the images and never insist on themselves.)
For a while, I had it following this image in an effort to point out backlighting and then present something backlit and subsequently drawing attention to an aspect other than the backlighting. (A good teacher–and what else is a curator?–makes efforts to build occasions into the lessons where the student gets to feel smart but by paying attention/staying engaged.)
Yet… all the time the only thing I want to talk about is the fundamental Russian-ness of his work.
I mention this all the time but I’ve yet to define it in any sort of non-abstracted fashion. I think I may have found a way to do it–not now, but maybe at some point down the road.
See: looking at this image, I’m reminded of Igor Mukhin’s color work with the Leica AG M9 (an absolutely fabulous camera if you can stomach the astonishing cost)–specifically the vivid blacks it renders.
Safin is using a Nikon d700 with a 35mm f1.4g lens–as far as I can tell it’s the lens he’s used for most of the stuff he’s posted in the last year or so.
A good 35mm lens is an interesting beast. It’s wide angle without adding too much unattractive distortion–the wider the lens for example the more unflattering it is to say the dimensionality of the human face, for example.
Yes: Safin is not using it on anywhere near the level of precision and care as Mukhin; but credit is due for managing what he does with a camera that’s a fraction of the cost as Mukhin’s top of the top of the line kit.
An idea occurred to me in the process of unpacking all the above: I began to wonder about respective influences of these two artists.
All I’ve managed to find regarding Mukhin is that he studied with Alexander Lapin and that he cites Alexander Rodchenko and Lou Reed as influences.
Rodchenko is actually super useful in getting at what I mean when I point to essential Russian-ness of a photo or image. (It occurs to me that it might be interesting to create an infographic wherein the historical influence of Rodchenko is mapped.)
Lou Reed is more interesting. I dig The Velvet Underground just as much as the next arty fucker. And I’ve heard literally all the correctives about what a heinous human being he was. (Anyone who worked at Film Forum in the mid-to-late aughts can tell you stories that will strip paint off walls.)
But, as far as I know, Reed believed rock and roll could save the mortal soul. (I think this is one reason his work appeals to me so very much; I would not be here now if it weren’t for music, in general–but specifical Rock and Roll.)
I found the mention of the influence of Rodchenko and Reed in a blurb about Mukhin penned by A. D. Coleman. I don’t agree with all the author’s conclusions; namely: I’d bet a tidy sum on the fact that Mukhin was intimately familiar with Robert Frank before he began documenting youth culture in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the notion that Mukhin is somehow inherently more conservative for not being familiar with/embracing the work of someone like William Klein is disingenuous, a bad faith engagement with Mukhin’s work and prejudices America’s role in the advancement of the photographic medium in a fashion that’s a little too imperialistic to be allowed to stand.
Interestingly–and I promise I’m working my way back ‘round to Safin, Coleman does at least imply the dual role of culture and individual taste in the creation of work. To the extent that Mukhin has lived in Russia all his life, his life has been impacted by state censorship then and now. I’m not entirely sure that his gravitation towards youth culture and it’s stock and trade in activities, practices and documents banned by the state was entirely innocent. (We move towards what moves us–so my thought is that Mukhin either already had access to western work most others wouldn’t have seen or he gained access to them through this path.)
But the question of how freely information flows and how it impacts questions of artistic influence is something to consider–all the more in the light of Mukhin vs. Safin; or: pre-Peristroka state censorship vs post-Soviet surgical censorship.
There’s a very fine line between doing the work and feeding the work. A better way to say it is that Andrei Tarkovsky always claimed that he was a better artist for having to navigate around concerns of state censorship–in other words: being able to convey his premise in both the shape, form and manner he intended while not running afoul of anyone.
I feel like as long as you are doing your own work and feeding the doing by critically, appreciatively and contemplatively looking at other people’s work–that’s a good place to be. The problem is that with so much information out there, part of the work becomes feeding the work and it’s dangerous to fall into that trap because that’s where it’s very easy to began aping the work of others.
And at the bottom of it I think that’s what I mean by essential Russian-ness the attempt to balance scarcity with abundance. Because speaking of mapping influence–an interesting project (and if anyone does this and does a good job I will actually post your work here): would be to map Marat Safin’s influences because I can’t think of another image maker whose work is such a who’s who of paen to virtually all the top notch internet famous photographers and image makers active today.
Acetylene Eyes 