The first post, as an indication that I am still alive

It's time to at least start, to start an official blog.

Ukraine, Primorskoye, 2012

It's hard to realize that at 30 years old, of which I've been a photographer for 10 years, I'm still not in demand on the scene. I have my own audience, and that's nice. But, as Igor Mukhin says, these are all pictures for Facebook. To get to a higher level, where everything is more serious, is my task.

I know a lot about “format” and all that nonsense, and I move very slowly. Sometimes it seems that all the time goes to waste, but it is not.

Elena Lungina wrote a comment on my FB where she made the point that I need to shoot and write all the time. Here. I'd love to write and shoot, if I had a brain or something to replace it. I would fly around in the sky at night and pick bits and pieces of my brain, and the good angels, who no one knows or has ever seen, would gently attach them to the crinkles of my brain, and I would sublimate it, little by little — it's hard for me because of the neuroleptics — into the products of activity.

Now I go to the store every day and buy cigarettes, Coca-Cola for 15 rubles, and cans of mussels in oil. I eat mussels and sleep. In my dreams I listen to Prodigy and perform secret tasks, and I see meaning, purpose and motivation in it. Sometimes I sleep awake and say monologues in blocks, and sometimes I say something unintelligible, by myself; and I drink 100 mg of Klozapin at night, and a shot once every two weeks.

Now with a fellow Marshani we are putting together a book or zine with a Quiet Ward story about the mentally ill. There are 150 pictures, printed on regular A4 sheets with a regular printer at a print shop. Sometimes I push my brain and lay out the cards on the bed, swap them around, stare, and generally work with what's not there. But work is hard, I'm a photographer and I work about that many times a day, at shutter speeds of 3-15 seconds, and the rest of the time I listen to music and read statuses on FB of three lines without understanding anything.

16 april, year 2015

The second post, I don't know what it's about yet

Here's the second entry! It looks like I copied this entry from someone else. There are so many entries, all over the place!

The third post about something

Portrait of a goat. Ukraine, Primorskoye

No thoughts. I don't know what to write about.

I was published by takiedela.ru. In two days I got 18,000 views and 1,000 reposts on Facebook. They published the asylum.

I have low willpower and spiritual HIV. It was hard work, making selections and coordinating everything with the photo editor Andrei Polikanov.

The publication turned out well. I can't say that it couldn't have been better, but with my daily skull-cracking, I can say that it all worked out.

A certain Mikhail Maksimov accused me of being a popsy and understated photo story. In general, it is hard to imagine that a photo story you have been working on for 10 years is underdrawn. But, of course, it could have been done better. And the popsiness is there. But what is popish? I simply became a professional photographer, a high-flying bird with all the complications that come with it.

There was a time when I couldn't stand popular pop music. There is good pop, but what I know is bad pop. I loved watching MTV when we first had it, and when Backstreet's Back Allright was howling on TV, I would jump up from my seat, knock out the TV and run out of the room in a panic. The heavenly sysadmins had put me protection against pop music, so I couldn't listen to it or even hear it at all.

With time the protection disappeared, and the music that I loved to listen to, considered it a ray of light, got bored and is perceived now as something commonplace, and this commonplace has shaped me in many ways. Now I can call myself a music anthropologist (if I put it right). I listen to anything that burns.

There are two sides to it. I found this out when the writer Victor Pelevin said somewhere that everything that exists, like my beloved Rage Against the Machine, for example, came about only because there was a need for such music to appear. The other side is that there's a four-piece band that writes their own very original music. And I'm sure they don't want to be little boogers. So what we can do is carve out a niche for ourselves.

Here were two photographers. One was shooting flowers, the other was shooting cats. The flowers were sponsored, but the cats were not. In the end, the flowers are trending.

What am I saying?

I'm not very sympathetic to contemporary photography. I look at the experience as a whole, I personally like the aesthetic of the mid-twentieth century, that time in which everything that could be photographed seemed to be shot and it was new. I don't like modern photo stories and I can't stand questions like, “What do you want your picture to say?” I believed that in order to make a good lily of the valley photo story, you didn't have to look at everything that had already been shot about lilies of the valley. As a young man, seeing all the pathos around World War II, I used to say, guys, the war is long over, and I was right. You can try to be the first person to see these lilies of the valley. You can do that if you still have the natural rent.

What am I saying? I guess there is a God, but in Russia everything is run by a Heavenly Asshole. That's a good phrase and I won't comment on it.

Journalists cover what is relevant now. The present is eternal. Looking at an old Gothic cathedral somewhere in Europe, I think that in my whole life I could only make a fragment of such a cathedral measuring one meter by one meter.

I think after the fourth or fifth paragraph I got a little carried away from the main idea, so I need to reread it.

A year ago I declared “Orthodoxy” as the topic of my diploma, bought 40 or 50 black and white films and went to Solovki. I felt bad there and ended up not filming anything. But after a while, I began to think about what God was. I'll say it again, but where did God come from? Or are we all descended from some kind of milpiddly boogers? And will it all come to an end at some point? Does eternity exist? I hope there is. People seem to be growing up fast right now, but they don't have a brain. And time is such a currency that holds you tightly by the balls. And it seems like in two or three generations things are going to change a lot. And you have to try to save face.

You can clearly see that all the powers that be are protecting their trough. There is no such thing as the president of Russia and Belorussia meeting, drinking some hard vodka and deciding to unite the two countries into one. A year and a half ago, Ukraine was on its knees and instead of helping, Putin snatched Crimea from them.

I don't know what I'm writing about. There is a complicated process going on. The more you know, the more you don't know. My brain is already boiling and, instead of growing, everything is just fixed. But I'm sure I'm creating some kind of image. This for me is the main thing (probably one of the main things) in photography. Not the expensive modern technique and not the prostitute who is trying to write it for me now.

Old Cross at the Cemetry. Ukraine, Primorskoye

I advise everyone to put good filters. Comments Off. I've always been not in favor of Facebook and I'm not in favor of the LiveJournal. I'm for standalone blogging. I hope to get over the disease of social media and all those clouds with tags. To express my thought on this internet, all you have to do is have a head on your shoulders and know HTML.

The following post will include a picture of naked women.

16 jule, year 2015

The fourth post — about summer days

How's it going?

Something is happening quietly. In August I visited Uglich, where a photography festival was held for a few days. I was there for two days.

I was invited to Uglich by Danila Tkachenko. We had sort of agreed to come together and leave together. In the end I went alone by bus, and came back with Denis, a novice photographer, with whom I made the acquaintance there in Uglich. Denis wants to shoot sports.

The first day I listened to different people in one way or another connected with photography in Russia. They discussed photos of women from Africa who had their genitals cut out. Danila Tkachenko mumbled something inarticulate about the three schools of photography that he considers the main ones. Martin Kollar, a Slovak, showed his cards from Israel. And at the end of the day, the festival's presenters gathered and gave a discourse, but I don't remember what it was about.

And on the second day there was a portfolio review. I showed my photos of the hospital, beach, subway and asphalt to Lena Firsova, Georgy Pinkhassov, Grigory Yaroshenko, Martin Kollar and the woman director of the Helsinki photography museum - I couldn't remember her name. According to the results Lena will maybe publish the hospital in Photo and Video, Grigory in his Facebook called me the discovery of the festival, Martin Kollar puzzled me with the question why I do all this and why on black and white film, Georgy Pinhasov said “not bad” and the director of the museum said that my photos are sincere and touching.

* * *

And on my return, a few days later, I went to Kristina Sholokhova's dacha. We were in the same year at the same institute and we still keep in touch. There is a 78-year-old woman in her village near Tarusa, who walks 15 km once a week to deliver the mail, and we made a report about her during one day. I took pictures with my camera, and Kristina made videos and chatted with me.

I shot 4 films and some cards, I think they turned out pretty good. I'll have everything developed, scraped and printed soon and we'll do a little exhibition at Christina and Sergei's Litcabinet gallery.

18 august, year 2015

Fifth post. To go to the hospital or not?

At the Disco. Ukraine, Primorskoye

It's a strange life. It's already kind of a mess, but something has to be said and done.

31 years old already. With the soul of a teenager and the body of an old man. Still no girlfriend and dissecting my corpse every day. And I'm aggressively dreaming of big money that I don't really need.

Soon we are going to renovate the apartment, but in the meantime I started painting with spray paint on the walls. A red star and something about love; and reminders about how to live.

I was on Ren TV. The man in the frame looked a lot like me after having coitus with a pig. There was a story about “psychiatry kills”. My pictures were shown. Mukhin somehow got into the story... Correspondent's quote: “Ivan is calm, good-natured”, “and only his eyes tell about mental illness”.

Tamara delivers the letters. Somewhere near Tarusa

My and Kristina's media exhibit “Tamara” took place.

Sometime in the second half of July, Kristina invited me to take pictures of an old woman who delivers mail to the village several times a month, walking 15 kilometers with a miserable salary.

We shot everything in one day and made an exhibition in her and Sergei's gallery, Litkabinet.

Pyu, our friend from Burma, bought one card for so many rubles.

We combined the opening day of the exhibition with my birthday. When I started to pop, both New Year's and my birthday began to come back to me. Just as if the toastmaster was retired Marilyn Manson. Everyone got drunk. I joke that I'm an invalid of my second youth.

27 september, 2015. Morning after a sleepless night.

The sixth post. After the hospital

Honestly, I'm afraid to write. But I have to start.

The Wu Tang is in the speakers.

I recently got out of the hospital, where I spent three weeks. It's very boring and there's a perpetual lack of that modern time. Several times a day after “Boys, lunch!” and “Boys, medicine!” there are lines lined up, as if by order, for food and pills. Once a day the doctor comes up and asks how you are feeling. Psychiatrists aren't gods to us, but close to it. “Quiet, electrosleep”.

Better to do without medicine altogether. Treat with herbs and milk and honey. To smear ourselves with green for fun, to pray and listen to the radio "Radonezh". And don't get sick at all. I wonder what kind of pressure Putin has? Putin is everything and Putin is nothing.

My head seems to be in some kind of order, but I'm still Frankenstein. Now I take antidepressants three times a day and a pill to sleep, at night, and a shot once every two weeks, the shot drives away the aliens and keeps me from going crazy.

If there are good angels, I ask them to help me adjust my wings so they don't let me fall.

I'm doing my diploma about the hospital this year. I've been shooting it for over ten years. There seems to be a good feedback and of all the things I do, these subway, the sea and the hospital, mean more than anything else.

I moved to a neighborhood in Krasnogorsk, Opalikha. There is a forest and birds are singing outside the window, I'm used to it. Now I live alone and I like it. I learn the zen of electric trains. Only there is no work and my room is a mess.

What about the girl, Vanya? — The angels ask, or maybe they don't ask. Well, before this story with drugs and medication, I was very much in love. And the feeling was strong. And with all this non-commercial photography, I began to love all people, but it became very difficult to love anyone in particular.

Before, if I was in love, the feeling was true anyway. Now there seems to be some kind of cupid overseer who drinks vodka and shoots in all directions at once. I don't like people who likes me, and I like people who don't like me. I'm also elementarily afraid to make the first move.

Right now I like sleeping and dreaming and looking at pictures closer to night, drinking coffee and listening to music on iTunes. And I don't like myself for becoming a NLP florist of some fucking stage as I get older, with a microchip instead of a brain.

Yury. Korsakova Clinic. Moscow

It seems to me that after death I might end up in an eternal labyrinth from which there is no way out. There I'll go through so many tests, which I hate: How can a ten-year-old kid solve the world's problems, and why isn't he getting paid for it?

It's probably going to be a comedy mystery porn horror. I'm already dreaming about women with five boobs and naked asses of degenerate photographers.

They say that everything we do here, we do to get to heaven, roughly speaking. It seems to me that because of this inclusion we have so little time. There we will be met by a bald man with a gray beard and a white robe, who must forgive and pardon everything. And in hell, our souls will burn. I don't understand any of this, but I know more than I can imagine. We are not talking about real knowledge. And we ourselves don't know what we know and what we don't know.

Now it turns out that since childhood we have been living to get respect and a social package from these propagandists. They successfully install all kinds of bullshit on us. I personally don't want to play these games and I want to be a freelancer for life. I didn't go to kindergarten, and in Orthodox school I had a no-holds-barred fight. At school I was on my own, but I was present in a collective, which annoyed me a lot. Teachers could not really get through to me and basic education for me is the truth. False or not. It's like a nervous tic that's always with me. A nervous tic that I am rich in.

You can know a computer better than anyone, but not know how it works. One can be perfect with photographic technology without knowing how it all works. You can be the smartest thinker in the world, but not know how to do it.

And there's a crisis outside and no money.

3 november, 2015

The seventh post. More about nothing than something

Aquarium Fishes. Korsakova Clinic. Moscow

I finally got a table and now I can scribble something.

The apartment has been redecorated, and I can't get enough of it.

I rented a room to Seryozha Maksimov.

I am preparing to defend my diploma. Diploma in photography book “The Quiet Room” and the exhibition with the same name. Now I'm starting a project on planeta.ru, to raise money for printing 30 books.

I have been prolonged life. At the end of June, I will go to a photography festival in Leipzig. I will be one of seven Rodchenko students to represent the School with the exhibition Metro.

I have been in the hospital for almost a month. Almost didn't take a single picture. I take antidepressants, which seem to be working. They make me feel good all the time.

I almost never take pictures. I want to switch to digital and shoot, shoot, shoot. Really, the kind of camera I need costs as much money as I don't have. I'm just tired of film. It got expensive and the post-processing got a little boring. It's a question of whether to shoot on film or move to the sensor.

The analog process gives the (more) real picture.

It's not a question of what to shoot on. You just have to shoot. Making a picture. Even without technique.

17 may, 2016