Veniamin Golubitskiy

Just Forever

Photographer’s mask designates the position of a researcher and an observer. Traveling offers the best way to accumulate a personal collection of observations. Veniamin Golubitsky is a photographer who travels. And his new show is a carnival where far away lands and neighboring towns race before our eyes: Europe, America, Asia, and… Moscow.

The cultural revolution of the XXI century is associated with the spread of photography. Fascination with it is a crucial part for the foundations of a new type of culture. It is a milestone in the transition from Homo Legens to Homo Visibilis. It means that the old representative of intelligentsia, a thoughtful reader and an enthusiastic writer, has been replaced with a new type of the intellectual whose interests and ambitions are associated with the sphere of the visual. This type of a human being is an attentive viewer and a “registration” addict. It is a person who strives to “capture the instant” in order to express himself.

Veniamin Golubitsky is an author of this new generation. And his experience in art is an example of creative evolution: from the poet to the photographer, from the collector of books to the collector of the images of reality. “Author” is an accurate definition for the composer of the new type for whom the goal is more important than the means of achieving it. So the shift from one media to the other is associated with the change in the main language of reality.

“View” is an important notion. While literature, reading, and writing were the crucial methods of registering your view in Russia at the end of the XX century, it is precisely photography which takes upon itself the function of the basic media for a dialogue with reality for the new educated class in the early XXI century. Photography has become a universal language (as Anatoly Lunacharsky promised at the onset of the new epoch), at last. The new technological base used to record images – the digital one – resulted in an incredible simplification of the shooting conditions. And it means that the old – craft – component of the process is no longer in the foreground. Vision is in the focus now.

Veniamin Golubitsky often shoots open spaces from the highest point. In different parts of our planet he keeps looking for the point of view where the horizon moves away from your eyes, and the world expands in the literal sense of the word. The photographic vision of the author is supported by the new, expanded perception of space.

The expansion of the world is a crucial phase in the recent history of Russia. Photography returns to its roots, to the excited experience of space characterizing the early photographic images of distant countries registered in mid 19th century. A new principle – euphoric collecting – appears where traveling turns into a lifestyle.

When you collect spaces and sensuous experience, it requires a certain discipline. For photography has given a universal language to the world. Yet, a personal visual dairy demands for accuracy and clarity in your records. The sum of impressions, recorded photographically, needs composition. The Multimedia Art Museum exhibition presents Veniamin Golubitsky’s space of contemplation.

This show is to celebrate the photobook by Veniamin Golubitsky issued under the same title by Autograph, a Yekaterinburg publishing house.