Provincial children

We are all children of the provinces. Usually, when we talk about contemporary Russian photography, we mean photographs taken in Moscow and St. Petersburg or by photographers living in these two cities.

Oleg Vidienin lives in Bryansk, thus violating established stereotypes, he photographs his characteristic portraits of locals not as strangers, but in search of "a person as a mirror, reflecting my state at the moment of taking a photograph" (in the words of Vidienin himself). This photographer very often photographs old people and children. The psychologist explains this by saying that a person in childhood and old age rejects the social mask, looks as he feels, lives without fear. The young are not afraid because they do not know, the old - because they no longer have anything to lose. A sociologist will say that photographer Vidienin captures two traditionally marginal parts of Russian society.

Russian society until recently exemplified the traditional model of patriarchal society, which has not ceased to be rural and which has not fully transformed into urban society. In the archaic model of society, children are incomplete human beings - possessing a soul, but incapable of being responsible for their actions, controllable, and in this respect much closer to the herd model than adult workers. Old people - a legible part of the traditional world - under Soviet rule were transformed into a group whose existence was not allowed to be mentioned. The orientation towards the future, towards the upbringing of the "new man" in a bright future, the enthusiasm of construction and transformation yards left no room for the past and its living representatives. "There is no place for old people!" - this is not a slogan from a contemporary movie, but a slogan preached throughout the long history of the USSR on Russian soil. If you look at photographs from the country over the course of the 20th century, old men are almost absent from official photos... The analyst, having at his disposal (exclusively) photos of old men and children, builds hypotheses about the inner experiences of the author, associating himself with the wise and naive....

Vidienin - a photographer of the Russian provincial paradox. Looking at his photographs, it is sometimes impossible to determine whether they were taken a month ago, or two years, or ten years back. The paradox of the provinces lies in time that has stopped. The paradox of the children of the province - in the unfulfilled hope of a mandatory (eternal) happy ending to every story.

Photography, especially direct photography that captures the essence of the photographer's dialogue with momentary reality, quickly becomes obsolete. After the passage of decades, it returns in the form of nostalgia to times gone by; after the passage of more years - it becomes a carrier of the image of the past, of history, covered with a cire of fantasies "of the beautiful distance." However, a photograph taken yesterday gives way to a new one. She must have special features, characterized by a certain multidimensionality, not only photographic, but - more broadly - visual qualities, to remain valuable for many years. It is likely that Vidienin's success, possessing the sensitivity of a psychologist in control of the essence of the subject, was facilitated by the Russian times themselves. "Sunken time," according to Joseph Brodsky's accurate term.
By directly comparing Vidienin's photographs of old people and children, one can make intimidating sociological predictions. Predictions of the occurrence of the apocalypse - the end of times, when everyone is still alive, but already beyond the limits of life, which is the course of events. The depth of such paranormal research depends directly on the incisive sincerity of Vidienin's photographs. However, this path of clear analogies, direct comparisons, should not be tread - this path lies too close to the bumpy road of using photographs as material in newspapers, magazines, illustrations of Soviet times. Indeed, exploring the timeless image of the nations, inhabiting the great

spaces of Russia, on the basis of Vidienin's photography, may prove astonishing. Then, however, photography will find itself in a subordinate, eternally subsidiary position. And the artist Videnin is excellent not only as a researcher, but also as a master operating only in the language of black-and-white documentary portraiture. If one compares a man with a book, Vidienin looks through the thickness of the volume, reading the first pages and the finale at the same time, through the surface of the present he sees the future or the past. What makes us stop at these photographs, what compels us to remember the author's name, is the ability to express the nature of reality itself, so multidimensional, ambiguous that not everyone is capable of fathoming its essence.
Mentioning Russian photography and photography of an earlier period - Soviet photography - it is impossible to avoid evoking the analogy between Vidienin and the Lithuanian school of "psychological documentation" with the dazzling Antanas Sutkus and Russian masters such as Nikolai Bakhariev, Evgeny Mochoriev and Vidienin. His photographs continue the tradition of psychological portraiture, going beyond the limits of style, i.e. beyond the limits of capturing the photographer's contact with the model, into the realm of social portraiture, his momentary (or timeless) state. Vidienin, like the old heroes of Russian and Lithuanian photography, is a photographer who leaves a visible trace in the visual memory of his viewers.

The subject of the little man, the same as in humanistic literature and cinema, or perhaps in painting of the period of critical realism, today is not a prerogative for the only national tradition of photography. It contains no more Russian elements than American, English or Swedish. And this is important - that in Vidienin's photographs, which one wants to analyze with such interest, trying to find the meaning of the times in the figures of contemporary compatriots, one can also find a contemporary international context.

In the summer of 2009, Oleg Videnin published his first book, "The Return Route" (Moscow, 2009). It contains 78 photographs by the author.Oleg Videnin (1963). Since 2005 a member of the Photographer.ru agency. He lives in Bryansk.

Irina Chmyrieva

The article appeared in No. 32 of "Kwartalnik Fotografia" in 2010