Mikhail Sidlin. Wide Russian body

Big bridges. Wide cheekbones. Hairy legs. Here is an example of female beauty. Thick thighs. Long feet. Low eyebrows. Asymmetrical breasts. Provincial erotica '95. The best project of the new Moscow photobiennale 1 .

Yoshkar-Ola is the city of my dreams. lives there Sergei Chilikov , Candidate of Philosophical Sciences (born 53) . Author of the "Village Glamor" series. The undisguised beauty of the Mari hinterland. This is what Moscow lacked.

But what about it? But what about it? Some will ask. And that one? With a foreign Japanese first and last name? And this one? It seems like ours, dear? But world famous? Bullshit. They were all made by a simple Mari philosopher.

Dutch oven. Homemade stool. Enameled mug. A disheveled aunt takes erotic poses in a hut against the backdrop of these wonderful objects. Bending languidly, she looks slightly slantingly into the camera, with a spring bed in the background (one of the best shots of the series). Hard naturalism.

Fashion & Style. This was the theme of one of the previous biennales. Smoothed bodies. Significant attributes. Verified shooting. Purified reality. This is what a staged fashion photograph looks like (its archetypal example). What Chilikov does is exactly the opposite of fashion photography. The other side of the photograph. Gnarled body. Objects that clog the eye: either oakum sticks out from between the trees, or some kind of rope is dragging along the floor, or even a shadow from an unknown something creeps into the frame. This is the poetry of chance, roughness and angularity. This “dirty reality” can easily be mistaken for the “true reality.” But it's not worth it. Because the author remains at a saving distance from the model. This distance is in the structure of the frame. In how “ineptly” Chilikov builds the composition.

Meeting of Andrei Karelin with the Duke of Edinburgh. It happened a century and a quarter ago. The Duke, while passing through Nizhny, visited the studio of the famous Russian light painter. He crossed his legs, threw his head back - and let's take it off, Lefty. “When photographed with a camera with any of the lenses that existed at that time, the figure would have appeared in the image with exaggeratedly large legs and knees, and the head would have been too small. To the surprise of the Duke - according to an eyewitness - he received from Karelin “an artistic portrait with full proportionality of all details" (Sergey Morozov. Creative photography). Surprise. Delight. Russian miracle.

The left leg is twice as long as the right. This is what a Mari aunt looks like in one of Chilikov’s “glamorous” shots. This is not a feature of the aunt. This is a feature of shooting.

Meeting of Andrei Karelin with Sergei Chilikov. Imaginary - happened. The descendant challenged the ancestor. What was a sign of “inability” more than a century ago is today a sign of skillful mastery of optics. A distortion that denotes convention. Because a natural person in a natural habitat is no less a convention than an ideal being in a skillfully created environment. And the village woman’s swollen backside is skillfully exaggerated by the photographer. Close-up - white butt.

The tyranny of the ideal. That's the danger of fashion photography. Where and when do Helmut Newton's models float ? In the conventional time of a possible world. Chilikovskaya Nyushka lives in Murzanaev. The place and time are extremely specific (there are even newspapers in the corner of the hut - you can look closely at the dates). The cruel pressure of reality.

Newton's best episodes are shocking. This is the shock of the ideal. It suddenly became too close - thanks to the photograph. The impossible world of super beautiful women is right before your eyes. The Chilikov effect is similar. Shock. But different.

The shock is real. The horror is that life is not like the sublime idea of ​​it. But the very image of “life by surprise” is as conventional as the image of “embellished life.” A little grotesque, a little irony, extreme nakedness, and the real - too close, a little closer than in real life, where our ideal ideas obscure from us the true outlines of our beloved bodies. The “unkempt image” washes away this veil of ideal ideas. The tool of deconstruction is optics.

Sincerity is an understanding of the rules of the game.

Notes:

1 What is Photobiennale'02

The Photo Biennale at the beginning of April became the #1 art event. This year she has three themes - body, landscape, children. It was in this order that three thematic exhibitions were opened last week: “Body and the Art of Movement” (at the Photo Center on Gogol), “Landscape” (gallery “A - 3”, in Starokonyushenny), and at the end - an exhibition about children (directly at Bridge "Bagration").