The ultimate aim of the project was to make "a group picture " of peoples of the Volga region. People belonging to certain geography, possessing the original history, allocated an original peculiarity of physical features, habits and customs or to say in short - the face. Speaking photographically is a portrait.

Five photographers have gone to five Volga region republics. They chose a route of trip and a theme of shooting independently, on interests. Sergey Bratkov has gone to Udmurtia to shoot people manufacturing Kalashnikov`s submachine-gun. In result he has made a series of monumental images of the Izhevsk steelmakers. Vita Bujvid has left to Chuvashia with intention to take pictures in a maternity hospital. And eventually she has collected from the photos made in Cheboksary three big photocollages devoted to a theme of human destiny and something reminding icons. Sergey Leontiev traveled on expanse of Mary El, shooting countrymen, but in result his vast portrait cycle included as well photos of the numerous townspeople. Valery Stigneev has been in Tatarstan where he has made the picturesque reporting on a life of the Kazan markets. But at the exhibition one half of his images was expressive female portraits, and another - as a background for them - a motley market crowd. And only Stanislav Yavorsky has not departed from own conception: he has arrived to Mordovia and has shot local beauties beside to Stepan Erzya's sculptures in a museum of Saransk.

So, the idea of "a group portrait" has failed. Because there can not be a portrait of people. The concept "people" is the collective, typical. And the photo represents concrete persons: their bodies and faces, real people in the environment of their natural life, that is much more fascinating than contemplation of any general type. Each face is unique, and the word "unique" means not only "the only thing of this kind ", but also individual, a fragment in the general picture of the world, on its background. In the "group of faces" the unique face disappears, remaining only the representative of abstract set. The person standing out against background gathers in itself the environment closed in a human body, recorded in a face and reflected in eyes.

Today photography takes a place of traditional arts - painting and drawings. It can be a parade portrait as works of Bratkov, Leontiev and Yavorsky, it can use in own manner means of historical canvas, as it on Bujvid`s pictures and finally it can be a cycle of fragmentary sketches made on location, as Stigneev`s photos. A personality is a monumental fragment. A photograph is the static fragment born from a pulse of the unique sight, refracted by a lens of objective. Does not matter how many photographic images would appear in the world, they could never tell us all about it. There is a clearance, a gap in reality always between them. Where there are two photographs, there can be the third photo seized that was lost between them. And this founded thing just can appear to be the most successful, and the new photo with the two former will make a series. A series stands somewhere in between a unique picture and infinity of the frames of the moving image (cinema or video), compensating their weakness and gathering advantages; rejecting old-fashioned pathos of the first and avoiding verbosity of the second; keeping, even as an opportunity, impression of the alive and concentrated contact to each of represented; breaking time on small eternity, on human faces. Perhaps, therefore contemporary photographers so like to work by series.

Vladimir Levashov

Organizers:
National Centre for contemporary Arts, Nizhni Novgorod Branch
Nizhni Novgorod Centre for Contemporary Arts "Caryatid"
Support:
Ford Fond
Fond "Open Region"
Fond "Volga Cultural Capital"
Conception:
Lubov Saprykina
Curators:
Vladimir Levashov, Julia Abramova