People ask how things are going for me on the professional/international front. My answer: nowhere fast. For two reasons.
Firstly, the clusterfuck in which “our village” (c) has become entangled, imposes certain restrictions. By working with foreign galleries and submitting works for international awards, I risk getting branded a “foreign agent.” You can’t explain to the comrade major from the secret services that France is the birthplace of photography, and that the photo fair at the Grand Palais in Paris is the most important event in the world. It’s not even the status of “foreign agent” as such that scares me, but the possible consequences for the people and organizations with whom I work.
Let’s be realistic, though: if they want to brand me a “foreign agent,” they’ll do it all the fucking same, so let’s move on to the second, more important reason.
Publications, exhibitions, and awards abroad put plenty of wind in your sails and boost your self-esteem. I am grateful to destiny for every such encounter on my professional journey. It was an important stage in my work, but I think I’m past it. International recognition is cool, but it still doesn’t compare to being liked and understood at home. Seriously: when people come up to you on the street to shake your hand, it’s worth a lot.
A connoisseur can correctly break down a creator and their work, but in order to fully experience what was happening at the time a photo was shot, you need a personal context. Roughly speaking, to appreciate the beauty of a picture taken in a bedroom district, I would argue that you have to live in a bedroom district. My social media stats show that the majority of my subscribers are Russian nationals in their thirties and forties, that is, people with the same background and cultural code as me. Eight out of ten of these people have nothing to do with photography, and these are probably the most valuable viewers, since I had the honor to introduce them to documentary photography.
When a stranger says that my photos rhyme with their feelings and memories, I experience (how should I put it?) a connection with something greater. This is probably the miracle of art: a moment in life that lasts one thirtieth of a second enables strangers to understand something fundamentally vital about each other. Ultimately, these pictures are mine as much as they also belong to each of the people who caught sight of something personal in them. Maybe not everyone will be able to appreciate my compositional techniques and artistic devices, but fuck them. They are just tools for conveying a message, and the message is the only thing that matters.
The simplest and, simultaneously, the most difficult thing is to understand your time, your place, and your metier. It seems I have succeeded in doing this: my photos get attention, and my books sell so well that every year I have to reprint them. So I just want to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can—here.
P.S. By the way, whereas earlier, according to my stats on (extremist) Instagram, Paris was in third place, after Moscow and Petersburg, in terms of numbers of followers, nowadays Chelyabinsk is in third place! This is definitely a sign of success.
Source: Dmitry Markov (Facebook), 3 July 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader
Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 3 July 2023: “A downpour on Ligovka.” I have spent so much time on “Ligovka,” i.e., Ligovsky Prospekt, and on the corner pictured here in particular, that I’m nearly sure it’s permanently imprinted on my brain. I’ve probably been in more than one summertime evening downpour on that very same corner. ||| TRR