Valery Plotnikov

photographer, 70 years old The author of the most famous photographs of Vysotsky and Vladi, Valery Plotnikov recorded the faces of many other prominent cultural figures (from Lily Brik to Dmitry Likhachev) and formed the idea of ​​a photographic portrait long before the advent of gloss and galleries in Russia: his frames were printed on bags, records and posters that decorated thousands of apartments.

Interview: Felix Sandalov

— We meet in Moscow, but you spend most of your time in St. Petersburg, right?

- Yes, but the fact is that it happened historically: I live in two cities, and, thank God, I have a workshop there and a workshop here. And an apartment there, an apartment here. And even a car there, a car here. But I live in St. Petersburg, but I still work more here. It is very convenient and profitable to receive fees in Moscow and live them in St. Petersburg. Although you need to have energy and health to rush back and forth like that. Now, however, Sapsan has been launched. By the way, I was his first passenger. I remember my student trips, then it was the Yunost train, inexpensive, but, in my opinion, it took seven and a half hours. By the way, at one time I really liked the proposal of Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak. He says to me: “Valera, why do you travel by train, by plane is much faster.” I say: “Anatoly Alexandrovich, you have a car to Sheremetyevo, and a car meets you at Pulkovo. So feel the difference."

— Was your affection for the city expressed in the pseudonym Valery Petersburgsky?

— Yes, in 1970 I took it. True, it was all calculated on fools, because one could have guessed from the very beginning who he was. But I was pleased when in one major newspaper the head of the department said at a meeting: why are you running around with this Plotnikov, now a photographer from Petersburg has appeared, he takes pictures no worse than your Plotnikov. Moreover, the pseudonym is quite provocative

In recent years, Valery Plotnikov has been photographing infrequently - the photographer is mainly engaged in cataloging and publishing his archives

was: because of him, they didn’t give me exhibitions, they didn’t publish under him. They said: “We don’t have such a city - St. Petersburg, we cannot represent you.” Moreover, I also deciphered this pseudonym in the interview. He said that I would wear it until my city again abandoned the thieves’ nickname. Naturally, this was never published.

- Aren’t you afraid to say that?

“Let’s just say they didn’t shoot for it back then.” And who am I? I’m not Alexander Isaevich or Galich, just a boy. And I explained that, like Fidel Castro, who said that he would not shave his beard until he built socialism in Cuba, I would not change my pseudonym until the city was renamed. And so it happened: Sobchak came, saw my photographs and put the question to a referendum.

— As I understand it, you have no reverence for Lenin.

- What is it! For me he is a bandit. How do you imagine that the leader of a gang would be pure and holy when there are bandits, terrorists, Dzhugashvili, Ordzhonikidze and others around? I remember very well how I came to my dissidence. I studied in a Soviet school, and we were told all these wonderful episodes - how, for example, Mr. Ulyanov, sitting in yet another prison, wrote his theses and had to convey them to his comrades in the struggle when he was released. How can I convey it? They won’t send anything. But it turns out that the tsarist regime allowed the prisoner’s bride to come on a date. So Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was chosen as a bride at the party cell. And I thought: well, they teach us in school that lying is bad, but she later lied to the authorities, and Lenin lied. And I say, no, guys, something is wrong here. And then more became known: about barges full of priests, and about the camps, and about everything else.

— Did you also understand about photography at school that it was yours?

- Not really. After school, I got ready and entered VGIK to the camera department. And in order to be admitted to the exams, you need to pass a preliminary competition. We had a competition of three hundred people per place, it was necessary

— Like Kalatozov and Urusevsky?

donate your photographic work. But I didn’t yet understand that I wanted to do photography. I entered the camera department because of Seryozha Solovyov, with whom I have known and been friends since I was fourteen. We intended to create such a powerful director-cameraman tandem.

- No, more like Eisenstein and Tise, like Pudovkin and Golovnya, like Romm and Volchek. And to be completely honest, like Antonioni and Gianni Di Venanzo. This was the meaning of life, and because of this I entered VGIK, because before that I studied at an art institute and graduated from art school at the Academy of Arts in a wonderful class where there were Oleg Grigoriev, a poet, and Misha Shemyakin, and Yura Rusakov. And so everything became focused on photography by the will of fate, because when I graduated from VGIK, it was a completely mediocre time of this binge, stagnation and all sorts of complete nonsense. Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky and Klimov were simply disgraced then like crazy. Everything that Valera Todorovsky now portrays in the film “The Thaw” has bent. And in the cinema that was supposed to be in the future, I did not want to participate at all, because all my life I have been doing only what I believe in, this is what I myself like and where there is no need to dodge, lie, film Ulyanov-Lenin, “The Young Guard” or the devil in a mortar. So I went into photography. Besides, since I was fourteen, I was in a completely unique circle. I knew Joseph Brodsky, Seryozha Solovyov, Lev Dodin - all of these were just friends of our circle of future filmmakers with claims, naturally, to genius. Sergei Dovlatov, Viktor Sosnora, Gorbovsky walked along Nevsky - there was an amazing, amazing concentration of talent.

— So the company pushed you to film it?

- Yes. As a child, I was such a boy in the arts, Seryozha and I went together to the Philharmonic, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, and we knew about the resolution

— It turns out that you formulated this as a mission for yourself?

according to Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. And I remember, let’s say, that I could still imagine Akhmatova from Altman’s paintings, but none of us knew what Zoshchenko looked like. But he was still alive then. If he had walked along Nevsky, no one would have paid attention. And somehow it just moved me: since I’m surrounded by so many people, I need to film them. And at VGIK, life simply grabbed me by the throat, because I understood who was worth what, and before all the titles of people’s artists and state prize laureates, I photographed Volodarsky, Katya Vasilyeva, Manevich, since all of these were my friends.

“I just didn’t want these faces to sink into the abyss.” For example, my third album is entirely dedicated to Vysotsky and, accordingly, Taganka, but not as a theater, but as a crowd of people who were around Taganka. In principle, no one forbade filming Vysotsky, Lyubimov, Schnittke, everyone there. But it’s like this: if you shoot Lyubimov, I’m not even talking about Vysotsky, you’ll get a slap. And the fact that they won’t be published is practically a guarantee, except perhaps abroad... As far as I know, there are two studio filmings of Vysotsky. One is French, the other is American. Because here the photographers knew for sure that this was... well, not a crime, but they wouldn’t praise you for it, and they would even put you in trouble, because the film was state-owned, the equipment was state-owned, the laboratories were state-owned, and that you were transferring chemicals to some people who were far from the official culture.

- There was only one risk: I already had a family and children - and I had to live somehow. Another thing is that I also photographed Soviet actors, and photographed them quite well, and I was helped by the fact that the same photograph was published fifteen to twenty times. And the fees were 9-12 rubles, despite the fact that a bottle of cognac cost about the same. If you did something new every time, you could just die. The most wonderful job was advertising all sorts of Soyuzplodimports; they paid well there. I even have an advertisement for vodka, where Nikita Mikhalkov appears as a model.

“Soviet Screen received angry letters: shame on your photographer, he takes pictures of our favorite actors in the toilet!” — Photographer Valery Samarin talked about how he earned extra money during his student years by printing photographs of Vysotsky and selling them by mail. As I understand it, copyrights were not even discussed.

— Were there any risks in this activity?

- Absolutely. After Volodya’s death, a laboratory assistant I knew called me and said that somewhere behind GUM they were printing my photographs and selling them for five thousand rubles a day - they say, come. These new Lada cars cost so much. I say: how do you imagine this, if on Red Square, where everything is tampered with, trampled and visible, they quite calmly sell these photographs? Even if you imagine that they give a policeman a hundred dollars a day in salary... Yes, they will easily say - they say, the author appeared here, make sure that we never see him again.

— What conditions did you work under in the seventies? Some kind of laboratory?

- No, I didn’t have anything, I didn’t even really have a camera then. Eternal memory to the photographer Edik Krastoshevsky, he gave me his Hasselblad to take pictures. I can imagine that if someone asked me for a Hasselblad right now, I would simply hang myself. What laboratory?! Almost the entire album of Vysotsky was filmed in the kitchen. There was a large kitchen covered with a tiled floor with characteristic checkerboards. And when these pictures appeared in Soviet Screen, then angry letters came: Shame on your photographer, he takes pictures of our favorite actors in the toilet! Because at that time, a tiled floor was an unambiguous sign of a public toilet for everyone.

- Yes. All this was already at the end of the country and time. In our city there were simply still surviving people in a very small, already thinned layer, who were really still from there. I remember this audience - when along Nevsky

— Did you feel then that you were capturing some kind of passing nature?