Alexey Titarenko, a master of evocative black & white street photography, discusses his major monograph, The City is a Novel, in B+W 305. First published in 2015 and now released as an extensively updated and extended edition, the work documents four cites: St Petersburg (the photographer’s place of birth), Venice, Havana and New York.
Working with analogue processes, Titarenko uses motion to evoke the feeling of a place.
‘What we see, what captures us, is an intellectual function of our brain,’ he says. ‘Our emotions are part of our understanding of what we see. Sometimes they are provoked by something, sometimes they are based on what we know, sometimes they are based on what we don’t know, but most commonly they are based on our everyday life and how we understand the events in front of us.
‘For example, an image of an explosion of a building. To people who live in a country at war, it would be a tragic image. But if you showed it in a place like New York, where this is a part of city redesign and reconstruction, it would be a sign of optimism – we are razing this old building to build a new development and give affordable apartments to New Yorkers. So, the most important thing is not what we see, but how we perceive it.
‘That’s what I was trying in my first big series, Nomenklatura of Signs, and what I continued to do, using different metaphors, in City of Shadows and in my current work. The use of metaphor allows an artist to show the observed not only as a document, but also their personal attitude towards it’.
Read Alexey Titarenko’s full interview with Jon Stapley in B+W 305.