TOWARDS THE HORIZON
2003—2014
I take photographs of province places during the several years now. This is my main topic, I would say. I live close to Moscow, but don’t really take pictures there and take every single opportunity to go somewhere far from it, to some small town or village. This is where I try to find some points of interest for my photographs. There is some charm, peculiar to the province life that big cities do not have.
In Russia one can feel
the difference between the capital and the province, the middle and the
periphery like nowhere else. Even the word “province” itself has some special
meaning in modern Russian language: it means “all the country, except its
capital”. Moscow, the great capital, the only center that dominates, while
everything else just depends on it. Moscow is self-contained, focused on itself,
has nothing to do with what happens outside it’s borders. This is a city of
great opportunities, the major life events happen here, while the province just
looks as faceless and inferior from this point of view.
When you leave Moscow
for province you feel like crossing the border between two different worlds,
the feeling of space changes so the feeling of time does. In the capital the
space is closed, limited by the buildings walls, time is concentrated, it is
always not enough. The space of province appears to be endless, it spreads
towards the horizon, and the time runs slow, almost by itself.
In province you feel
you want to walk. The more space, the more your feet can cross. The slower time
flows the less you hurry. The regular life goes slow. One can find it gray and
boring; other can find there something the capital does not have: the feeling
of the ground and nature, the escape from city bustle.
Different space means
different people. Yes, they can be not as smart as those who live in the cities,
the demand much less, but at the same time they are much more real and
open-minded, their honesty is what you want to believe in.