Grigoriy Yaroshenko

Britain

Grigoriy Yaroshenko has been taking photographs of Great Britain for more than ten years — almost throughout his creative career. You could say he knows Britain as well as an outsider can know a foreign country.

vThe exhibition includes a few of his early works, which are easy to identify by the author’s intentional aloofness from his subject matter. Over the years the style of his photography has changed, and now Yaroshenko is far more interested in purely professional issues: playing with citations and references to classics of British photography such as Ian Berry (author of the book The English), Mark Power and Martin Parr, by whose work Grigoriy, like many others, learned to distinguish what is quintessentially English. The photographer was also greatly influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, which provided a source of inspiration for an entire 70s generation.

Through many years of ‘life in two countries’, as he writes in his autobiography, Yaroshenko has come to understand a lot about British visual culture, which is traditional and provocative at the same time. In England, as in Carroll, nothing is entirely obvious, and what is seen is not necessarily true. The English conceal deeper meaning in jokes, contexts and nuanced intonation. The same applies to Yaroshenko, whose photographs nearly always express something more than what is directly perceived, often something very different.

Olafur Eliasson’s installation at Tate Modern in the former power station’s Turbine Hall, with the fixation of an artificial sun. The cult music festival at Glastonbury, where three Saxon kings and the legendary King Arthur lie beneath the ruins of an ancient abbey dissolved under Henry VIII, turns into a camp of merrymakers, new barbarians bent on capturing the island for the umpteenth time. In his photographs even the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton serves only as a setting for celebrations filled with a heartfelt unity among ordinary people, a unity others can only dream about.

In 2010 Grigoriy Yaroshenko travelled all over Scotland, visiting nearly every hamlet, distillery, cooperage and village pub in an effort to understand the local inhabitants (true enough, the Scots, particularly highlanders, are far more open and straightforward than residents of London’s Belgravia or Chelsea). By and large he is now well acquainted with them. Hopefully we too can draw a little closer and learn more about them from the ‘Britain’ photo project.

Nina Levitina

The ’Britain’ project was conceived in London 10 years ago, in 2001. Not entirely understanding what I was doing or why at the outset, I took photographs of my experiences over a period of more than ten years. This work was based on hundreds of rolls of film, thousands of printed images and several exhibitions (’LondON’ — M’Ars Gallery, Moscow, 2005; National Liberal Club London, 2006; ’Traces’ — Glaz Gallery, Moscow, 2009; ’Spirit of Scotland’ — Atelier Am Eik, Dusseldorf, 2010; Leica Gallery, Moscow, 2011).

Many photographs have not yet been taken and many photographs lie ahead, but I now have a clear view of my unfinished project about a great country — great in the geographic and historical rather than political context, about a vanished Empire, the people and their life today. A land where, remarkably enough, the most irreconcilable enemies have managed to get along together, although even a hundred years later their descendants remember the injuries and insults they suffered. But they had the ability and capacity to move on, build new homes, bring up children and live peacefully while not forgetting their past, their fathers and grandfathers, their ’good’ neighbours, their history and traditions. All together and each separately, they overcame their hatred, their pride and wrath.

I certainly do not pretend to be objective, to have conducted serious analysis or research, I simply show the viewer a small part of my long-term daily observations of the country and people. My aim was to see and show what was real, living and genuine but well concealed behind multi-layered camouflage of stereotypes, customs and behavioural norms, the sanctity of private life or written and unwritten behavioural rituals.

Grigoriy Yaroshenko