Free Market Exposure (on the state of photography in Russia)

Free Market Exposure

By WILLIAM MEYERS, Wall Street Journal  Sept 14
Moscow

Fine-art photography is a business: Artists need markets to sell their photographs so they can continue to make art. This is true, too, in the former Soviet Union, where markets of all sorts are a recent innovation. That there are photographers who want to establish themselves was evident last month when the Iris Foundation, a Russian nonprofit, funded a portfolio review here conducted by the Houston-based FotoFest organization.

FotoFest co-director Fred Baldwin says 2,396 artists—from Siberia, Belarus, Ukraine and points in between—applied for the 180 available slots. The winners had the privilege of having their photographic projects critiqued by an international assortment of curators, gallery owners, teachers, and book and magazine publishers—people who could further the artists' careers if impressed by their work.

The atmosphere in the historic Garage Center for Contemporary Culture during the week of reviewing was intense, as photographers showed reviewers their desolate landscapes and wasted people, in black and white and in color, in many sizes and all different styles. But one question hung over the proceedings: How were those photographers who have their talent certified going to make their careers?

A photo book helps establish a photographer's reputation, and among the reviewers was Leonid Gusev, who gave up active participation in his successful advertising agency in 2003 to found Treemedia, the only independent publisher in Russia devoted exclusively to photography books. Mr. Gusev is proud of the 11 books he has so far managed to bring out, including World Press Photo prize-winner Sergey Maximishin's "The Last Empire: 20 Years After." But there are no printers of quality photography books in Russia, so Mr. Gusev prints his books in Germany or Turkey and imports them at great cost. And since distributors in Russia are unreliable, Mr. Gusev delivers his books to retail stores himself, and also sells them online. Press runs are small, profits elusive, and he picks new books cautiously.

Photography, like any fine art, needs a sophisticated audience. Helping to spur the development and understanding of the art is the Moscow House of Photography, which moved into its impressive new building last year. The motivating force (and "force" is the right word) at MHP is Olga Sviblova, a voluble blonde in black Prada jeans who in the late 1980s began curating Russian art exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Before that she and her poet husband had been part of Russia's clandestine bohemian underground; she sustained herself for six years by working as a street sweeper. The organization she now presides over was built with help from France's photography institutions but is maintained by the city. It has an important archive of 100,000 Russian photographs.

During the summer, the exhibitions at MHP included "From the History of Russian Photography: The Russian Photographic Society (1890-1930)—Union of Photographic Artists of Russia (since 1991)" and "More Than Fashion: Photographs From the F.C. Gundlach Collection." The first show fulfills one of the mandates Ms. Sviblova set for MHP, which is to educate her people about their own artistic heritage: One floor featured mostly soft-focus and sentimental pictorialist work from the first period, and on another floor photojournalism from the second. The museum's ambitious publication program is intended to serve this same end.

Another of Ms. Sviblova's mandates was to expose the Russian people to the best of international photography: "More Than Fashion" includes images by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, Zoe Leonard, Leon Levinson and Wolfgang Tillmans. Ms. Sviblova also established a school and a series of exhibitions and competitions—to identify, cultivate and promote local talent. She is determined that contemporary Russian photographers will produce something more valuable than Soviet-era "mythology."

In another part of Moscow, a commercial enterprise works to the same end. The Winzavod Contemporary Art Center is a warren of galleries, boutiques and cafes carved into an old red-brick winery. Larisa Grinberg's Gallery.Photographer.ru opened there in 2007, and it serves as the office for her agency and book-publishing ventures as well. She has pale blue eyes and, like Ms. Sviblova, a deep sense of the past: the early experimental photography of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky in the 1920s, the heroic war photography of Dmitri Baltermants and Yevgeny Khaldei during World War II, and the gray postwar decades when no foreign photo books or magazines were allowed into Russia. When some books of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs slipped in from Riga in the '70s, they created a craze for "decisive moment" photography. Now everything is permitted—nudes are no longer considered illegal "pornography"—but photographers must compete against international standards.

In October Ms. Grinberg and Schilt Publishing of Amsterdam will publish Sergey Chilikov's "Selected Works 1978-." Ms. Grinberg represents Mr. Chilikov, a nonconformist photographer approaching the age of 60, whose early photography in his native Yoshkar-Ola region emphasized the sensuality of ordinary people. As with most of Ms. Grinberg's other artists, Mr. Chilikov's works sell better abroad than at home.

To help develop knowledgeable Russian collectors, Ms. Grinberg produces a meticulous press release for each of her gallery shows, and this season she will sponsor two lectures: Gallerist Sergei Popov will talk about collecting modern photography, and Alexei Loginov, of the Russian Humanitarian State University, will explain why prints cost as much as they do. Ms. Grinberg knows that an artist like the talented landscape photographer Alexander Gronsky, to pick just one of the young people on her list, would be better appreciated and more successful financially if the native market were as sophisticated as those elsewhere.

For an art to flourish, certain necessary elements must be connected. Evgeny Berezner, the chain-smoking official in the Ministry of Culture responsible for photography, is concerned that Russia lacks the networks necessary for photographers to find their audience. Mr. Berezner is familiar with the infrastructure of museums, commercial galleries, schools, critics, magazines and Internet sites that nurture artists in New York, Paris and elsewhere. He served as Head of Project for the portfolio review in the hope that contacts made here would develop into institutions. Irina Chmyreva, a photo historian, teacher and Mr. Berezner's assistant, said that before the review most photographers knew each other only online, if at all: Now they had finally met "eyes to eyes." Mr. Baldwin, from FotoFest, said he heard that plans for several blogs were under way.

The morning after the portfolio review, I met one of the reviewers, Jim Casper, editor of the popular Paris-based magazine Lens Culture, in the lobby of our hotel. I asked him what he thought of the photographers overall. He said he thought it was interesting that their work showed so little influence of trends elsewhere in the world. Maybe it was from lack of exposure; they were working hard and finding their own ways. Now Mr. Casper's dilemma was figuring out which of those photographers he had seen would be published in Lens Culture.

Mr. Meyers writes on photography for the Journal. See his work at the website www.williammeyersphotography.com.