PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEXANDER SLIUSSAREV WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL MODERNIST PHOTOGRAPHY. 1920S–1970S
Keywords:
World contemporary photography; Alexander Sliussarev; modernism; art photography; individual creative method; art practice.Abstract
The author examined the work of one of the greatest masters of modernist photography in Russia — Alexander Alexandrovich Sliussarev (1944–2010) — in the context of 20th-century world photography. The author compared Sliussarev’s creative method with the practices of European and American photographers. The comparison covers entire periods of work of such close to him in style authors as Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Christer Strömholm. To clarify the boundaries of the phenomenon of Sliussarev’s creativity, his works contextualized within the concepts of modernist and postmodernist photography by such authors as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Mapplethorpe, whose practices were very far from his own. In the text, the figure of the artist-photographer Sliussarev is constructed as a constant, the facets of which are compared with trends and personalities in the history of art throughout the modernist period of development. Among the Russian authors whose work was in dialogue and under the influence of Sliussarev’s talent, Sergei Chilikov, Andrei Bezukladnikov, etc. are mentioned. In the article, the author considered Sliussarev’s influence on modern photography in the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1990s. An important place in the text is occupied by a comparison in the modernist tradition of photography and painting as equal forms of art, each of which has its own specifics, but is not inferior to each other in expressiveness; Sliussarev’s searches in optical art are compared with the pictorial experiments of Piet Mondian, Giorgio Morandi, Vladimir Veisberg, and others. Also, on the example of Sliussarev’s work, the author analysed the problem of the evolution of modernist art photography in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
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