Andrey Abramov

Simulators of the city landscape

My work does not entail digital manipulation, nor do I create the subject matter that features in my photographs. I take what already exists in an urban milieu as the basic framework for my landscapes, working with the chaos and accumulation of spots, lines and geometric objects that surrounds us in everyday life.

In my images I devise a new kind of interrelation between ordinary things and create another reality — photographic reality. My ‘simulators’ are a shift into the authorial, ‘virtual’ space engendered within photography. Visual poetry. This world is based on the nature of our perception, by which we see various projections of an internal world that is part of the collective unconscious in the space around us. Psychedelic images that appear in life’s never-ending flow.

For me photography is a way of life. Working on a series is a process as creative as the actual shoot. It takes a long time to scrupulously select images so that they intensify one another, creating powerful visual and semantic affinities. Each series represents a unified work. Something akin to photographic ‘yin/yang’. Combining the photographs in pairs or arranging them in a larger block is a way of developing the idea behind ‘Simulators’. For each photograph a second is chosen that corresponds to it visually or semantically, and this provides new opportunities for plastic and semantic game-play. Like an anagram constructed by rearranging the letters or sounds of a certain word (or several) to produce another word with a different meaning.

Andrey Abramov
Born in Moscow in 1986. Studied at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics 2003 — 2006, and the Moscow University of Culture and Arts (class of Yuri Babich) 2006 — 2010. Participated in the Volga Biennale Young Photographers of Russia (Nizhny Novgorod) in 2006 and 2010. In 2012 he won awards at the Young Photography 2011 2/2 — Current competition (FotoDepartament, St. Petersburg), and the Centro/Peripheria contemporary art competition in Rome, Italy.