VICTORIA DAY

EYE SECTOR

Women photographers working in the press are chivalrously called "photographers". Photographer "Novaya" Vika Ivleva, although she was born in the same house with Alexander Blok, she photographs war more willingly than beautiful ladies. In a word - Victoria. Her ...

Women photographers working in the press are chivalrously called "photographers". Photographer "Novaya" Vika Ivleva, although she was born in the same house with Alexander Blok, she photographs war more willingly than beautiful ladies. In a word, Victoria.

Her photographs are all black and white. And there are more black people, as well as on the planet as a whole, than white people.

With Vika it is not easy to go to an interview with white people - because after five minutes of shelling any "star" ceases to be a star and becomes just a person under the gun of a long tongue and lens.

She did not study with Baltermants and other classics of war reporting; she was once struck by an exhibition of American photography. "Unlike us, Richard Avedon had the whole world as a teacher."

At the faculty of journalism, she chose a photo group, because in the 80s "it was more truthful to shoot than to talk." No matter how dispassionately Vika documents the offal of a nuclear reactor and minefields, the eyes of the crippled and the bodies of the dead, her furious silence is always heard in the frame.

“If everything is on the shelves in your head, then everything will be on the shelves in the frame” - such violence categorically does not suit her. In third world countries it is more interesting than in Russia, and in Russia, even ten years after the barricades, it is more interesting than in the West: life is less ordered. An ambulance traveler, Ivleva travels around the world with a camera pass. With humanitarian organizations, they do not coincide in harshness. "If they shoot, then it's time to go."

Due to “humanitarian ignorance”, she ended up in 1993 in Tajikistan the only journalist who was taken into the Red Cross car. And in 1991, he was the only journalist in the world who filmed in the Chernobyl reactor.

“There is some very short period of time while you allow yourself to take pictures. The main thing in this profession is to stop shooting in time to help, and stop helping when you need to shoot. The criterion of truth is simple: aren't you ashamed to tell the children.

Before sharpening, she finds the denominator - blurring the line between whites and blacks, tourists and Bedouins, missionaries and victims. There is no feeling of peeping in her shots - faces that are strangers from the outside, suffered from the inside, are turned to the viewer personally.

"Are you a director?" "No, I'm a friend." She knows how to watch and wait (“But not for hours!” - that’s why she doesn’t take pictures of animals). “I am waiting for the moment when people begin to perceive me so close that I can tell them: move your hand a little to the left!”.

It's not on "you", it's on an equal footing. She talks about love with the director of the bakery, with the Bedouins about their delicious unsanitary food, with a peasant woman about her wonderful gauze tunic and her children, whose photographs she drags with her to Africa instead of a reporter's portfolio.

It’s good to go on reconnaissance with her or visit aliens - Vika is her own everywhere. To become his own, he breaks over the barriers - with humor, in three languages, in a black silk dress and Chanel slippers (which have become a uniform for the entire African epic: it's more convenient). They go to war in camouflage, and if they go to people through the war, they dress up “in peace”.

Among the obstacles that Vika swept away is a Russian-Arabic phrase book mastered in the desert, an anti-malarial mosquito net (the end point of the African mission was the infectious diseases hospital on Sokolina Gora), eaten goat eyes (a rare delicacy among the hospitable Karakalpaks on the Aral Sea), proud that she bit into Dushanbe of a pilot who did not want to take anyone on a plane, but still cannot forgive himself for having disdained an invitation to dinner from a nice Negro old woman from the Kenyan slums.

Her heightened sense of social justice got everyone: well, no one can answer the question why sheep and stem cells are cloned in one place, and the whole continent cannot read and write, although the planet is round. Vika can show it - where she would like to live, in London (although clones are made there) or in St. Petersburg (although this is Russia, part of which is a minefield).

She can make it so that before the submission of the issue, our artist Sarukhanov draws homework for her son, that all the youth of the editorial office stop drinking for 24 hours, line up and (voluntarily) go to donate blood, and the rest deal with the problems of the orphanage, which takes care of Ivlev. And now, when the issue is being made up, one of us does not work, but glues materials for the exhibition.

The exhibition opening today at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art at 17 Ermolaevsky Lane is called "The Apotheosis of War". “Really, an unhackneyed name?” Vika said looking into her eyes. I must say, Victoria herself is a redhead. And everything she does, as happens with fiery people - black and white. Which we think is good.