Back to MDF

The Back in the USSR exhibition was opened in the Manege with the efforts of employees of the Moscow House of Photography today in the capital begins photo -to -2006 photobiennale - a real disaster for journalists and a prolonged holiday for those who “hooked” the photograph, this is the most important (in any case, the most democratic) of all arts of the early 21st century. But even in the previous days, MDF did not let lovers of the photography be bored, as they called it a worthy lesson a hundred years ago.

For example, in the lower floor of the arena, an exposition of photographs of Alexei and Eduard Zhigaylovs Back in the Ussr - color and black and white chronicles of the country who had gone into non -existence of the country opened. At the entrance, two sculptures are loomed, looking in the direction of the non -existent hotels "Moscow" (already) and the crystal chapel (for now). Apparently, they stayed here - and, it seems, for a long time - after the recent exhibition of Zurab Tsereteli. Over the past fifteen years, the city (as, indeed, the whole country) has changed a lot, but to restore in memory, “how young we were, how we believed in our senses,” you can go down to the lower level of the re -built arena. Among other things, the exhibition is also a memory of MDF closed to the reconstruction: familiar black frames, the same hanging the photos “in a denial” (that is, not at the same level, but as if symmetrically relative to the horizontal axis of the exposition), even the former waiters on a modest buffet.

It cannot be said about such an exhibition that it turned out or did not work out: pictures, although partly staged and clearly made to order, more or less objectively reflect the recent Soviet everyday life. A professional qualification in the editorial offices of Soviet publications was still high, the official camera was not given to anyone in their hands. Everything is right here. The sixties are French President Charles de Gaulle on the streets of Novosibirsk. The photographer “On the Presidium of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences”, shot in 1967, is strangely correlated with the recent work of the conceptualist Vadim Zakharov “Ecstasy the audience gives the author”: the best representatives of Russian science at some official meeting are so executed. The Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin alone crosses the paving stones of Red Square in a recognizable scrap cap. The collective farm poultry, which was seen in 1971 in the Krasnodar Territory, looks like a memory of the times before the era of "bird flu". “Workers choose the director of the Mosrentgen plant - this, of course, is already a restructuring, the year 1992.

“Bread“ Pick up ”from the tript“ Master of the Earth ”; "Date at the Hermitage" with the famous Atlantes; Brezhnev on the rostrum in Gelendzhik. The following is known about the authors, who have laid the last three decades of Soviet history. The senior Zhigailov, Alexei, was born in the Stavropol, and studied at Moscow State University. In the thaw 1964, he became a full-time employee of the News Agency, his own correspondent for Siberia. The younger Zhigailov, Eduard, graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University in 1982; Working for many metropolitan publications, he traveled to Central Asia, Yakutia, the Far East. At one time, Mikhail Gorbachev accompanied the first and last president of the USSR on trips. In the list of recognizable “fashion models” there are also Yuri Nikulin, Vyacheslav Polunin, Yuri Luzhkov. All of them look quite traditional, but there are several very exclusive pictures at the exhibition. The signature under one of them is unexpectedly verbose: “This dog entered the Chernobyl reactor with a video camera on the head” (1986). On the other - “in the mausoleum. Inspection of the leader ”(1990) - people in white coats were thoughtfully bowed over the Lenin Mummy. And they said that he is now alive than all the living ...

03/22/2006 / Sergey Safonov, the material was published in the newspaper No. 49 dated 03.23.2006.