Crossroads: Contemporary Russian Photography

Overview

The five contemporary photo-artists of Crossroads show just how artistic the camera can be.
Oleg Videnin shoots the people of his home town of Bryansk, about 350 kilometres south-west of Moscow. They are ordinary and their portraits, honest and intimate. Aleksandr Gronsky, on the other hand, also shoots reality but his large-scale landscape scenes seem more surreal than real. In hyper-real focus and detail, Gronsky captures an unbelievable (especially for us sunburnt Aussies) landscape where the line between snow-covered ground and sky is blurred.

Side-stepping reality, Gregory Maiofis brings together unlikely subjects, and the historical printmaking techniques he uses provide the dusty, soft aesthetic. This aesthetic is mirrored in Andrey Polushkin's photos, also out of focus around the edges, although the imagery here is much more haunting, using found pictures of people during World War II. This overt political tone is also present in Sergey Bratkov's installation, created specifically for this Australian Centre for Photography show, which fuses images of young men at a 2010 nationalist demonstration in Moscow and images of commercial glamour.

Image: Gregory Maiofis, Adversity makes strange bedfellows, 2006