Growth lessons

Conversation with photographer Yuri Growth about life and teachers

You take pictures, then there was no tank, there was a “corex”, a ribbon with pimples, wound a film, somehow show, somehow fix it. The bathroom was public, it was impossible to print there, because there were twelve neighbors. A small kitchen was organized in two rooms, I hung it and printed primitive photographs to friends. A person with a camera used certain privileges. He, as it were, participates in life, and at the same time he is aside.

Andrey Dmitrievich Sakharov had a huge impact on me. I learned a lot from him and continue to study, because I loved him, I understood him, and we had a good relationship with him. I did not make efforts for this, but he was extremely careful in assessments. But, nevertheless, I knew that he lets me in his back - this is a very important point in life. That is, he trusted me. And there were even cases when he did not invite me to photograph him, but in order for us to talk.

There was one difficult situation that I will not talk about now, he called me and asked: “Yura, can you come?” It was 11 pm o'clock. I arrived, we sat until four in the morning. Some person had to come, promised to prove to Sakharov that he was right about this case when they bombed his own. You know this story, which at the congress caused a storm of indignation.

Sakharov opened for me, of course, not immediately, because I first saw it in 1970 - it was a very long time ago. He took his photograph, which was preserved for me and which served me as a kind of pass when he returned to Moscow, and I met him alone from the journalists. There were many foreigners, but I was one of the Soviet journalists. Then, when a day later I came to his house, I presented this photo as a pass.
And then we had a big and good life.

Once, when I lived next to the hippodrome, I traveled in a rocking rod as a amateur rider in the tenth stable at the master-rider Dima Eitingov. Once I accidentally won some weak arrival, in another race I had a skirmish, I failed. Here is March or April, the first race in aispe, the opening of the summer season. And there, among the professionals, there is one arrival of amateurs, the most desirable among players, the hippodrama of these bugs and all. Because if you can agree with a professional rider, he controls something, then you can’t agree with an amateur, he can neither give in or win. Therefore, this is the most honest race.

I rolled a vocabulary on the stallion, which was inferior to four horses in renunciation, and the amateur people rode with me, because they were mainly from the journal Horse Sports and Horse Body, Agriculture, they were almost professionals, because they were engaged in this case for a very long time. And so I go on the path, green camisole, black sleeves, black helmet. I had a “armless” nickname: the sleeves are black, it means an armless. Etings stands when leaving for the hippodrome path, and next to him the great rider Ratomsky, master. This is Tuscanini. Not lower. I'm slowly going, stop and want to ask for advice. I say: “How to go?” He looked - Dima Eitingov is silent reverently. Ratomsky says: “Lexicon? Well, you,” he says, “don’t go into the crowd, go into the fields if that.” “How to go?” He says: “Go? Yes, by driving.” That's all.

Here is my advice: in life it will lie and take off. Take off what is needed, what is not necessary, what you like, what you do not like. The main thing is not much.

The program "Teachers of Yuri Growth":

Conversation with photographer Yuri Growth about life and teachers