Frontpage & Backstage

Photo exhibition by the Kommersant Publishing House

XII INTERNATIONAL MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN MOSCOW
‘PHOTOBIENNALE 2018’

Curator: Pavel Kassin

It is impossible to imagine Kommersant without its special style of photography. A supply of information that was entirely new for the domestic context and a novel concept of why newspapers need photographic illustration were part of the revolution sparked by the launch of Kommersant. Where the Soviet newspaper confronted the reader with a frozen, solemn and lacquered reality, the leading post-Soviet newspaper brought vivid, lively images. They were studied, remembered and discussed as eagerly as today’s internet memes. The usual hierarchy was overturned: apparently a wholly insignificant participant in an event could be revealed as the protagonist, and an important person of state significance could be viewed as an almost comic figure.

Politicians, businessmen and cultural dignitaries became accustomed to the fact that they might appear ridiculous on the pages of Kommersant, but it turns out that irony was not the main factor. Kommersant has taught us to see social, cultural, sports and other events differently, out of the box. The photos in Kommersant instilled and continue to instill the ability to discern above all something personal or unconventional in boring officialdom, in a solemn event or disaster.

On the one hand this is a momentary journalist necessity: in this way it became easier to respond to information in the text ‘accompanying’ the image. On the other hand, these occurrences of a personal view form a picture of the history of Russia, and sometimes the world, that has no equal. Kommersant’s ‘Ъ’ Photo Service, which for the first five years operated under the name Primus Photo Agency, appeared in the spring of 1992 and has now covered events for more than a quarter century. Since then it has been headed by Sergei Podlesnov, Eddy Opp and Pavel Kassin.

Today the photo service is still an extremely important and large-scale division of the Kommersant Publishing House. In addition to its function for the newspaper, the service is responsible for a number of illustrated magazines and thematic applications, as well as a site featuring its photo galleries.

The everyday work of the photo service is not only to seek and select the necessary illustrations, although the Kommersant school is evident here, too: the brilliantly captured moment must be just as astutely noticed and chosen from the available shoot, with an eye to the rigid schedule of a daily publication. Kommersant possesses a photo archive of more than 11 million images which is constantly expanded due to the efforts of 14 staff photo correspondents. This is another parameter that makes the Kommersant Photo Service the largest producer and owner of photographic images in Russia.

Kommersant has always attracted the most capable and outstanding news photographers in the country. Year after year their talent, combined with the skills and principles inherent to the style of the publication itself, engenders works whose artistic and journalistic value transcends the limitations of information utility. Many of the Kommersant correspondents have won photo competitions and awards, both international and Russian. Kommersant’s most recent achievement was last year’s World Press Photo prize given to Kristina Kormilitsyna, but many previous awards were bestowed on photographers from the publishing house: for example, you may recall Anatoly Zhdanov’s victory, or the World Press Photo prize awarded to Eddy Opp for his series on the storming of the White House in 1993. A large number of the country’s currently active news photographers came from Kommersant, and for them their work experience in the publishing house proved important and determined their future in a professional sense.

Among the pictures presented at this exhibition are images that won awards, testimonies that are valuable in a documentary sense and as a unique point of view, and also genre studies. Many of them ‘held’ the front pages of Kommersant years ago, yet retain their topical resonance to this day. Newspaper texts become obsolete by definition, and even the wittiest headlines sometimes need an explanation of context. Only a photograph can always be understood.