HILLS AND RAVINES

Landscape is one of the fundamental genres in the history of photography. However, the aesthetic of uncritical admiration of nature, so relevant in the 19th century, corresponded poorly with the realities of the 20th century. Modern art and photography, increasingly encroaching into the social and political sphere, demanded a rethinking of the genre. This gave rise to the "New Topographics"—a modification of landscape, named after the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.

Ivan Mikhailov's series News from the Periphery: Hills and Ravines can be viewed precisely in this context. These are landscapes devoid of human presence, but not of human traces: man is not in the frame here, but he is in the landscape—he is its main architect. These images balance between social commentary, ecological observation, and visual poetics.

News from the Periphery is a narrative about the expansion of urban space, about how it slowly but inevitably consumes the fields, hills, and ravines familiar to the author since childhood. These spaces are not yet fully subjected to a single standard—they are border zones, a frontier where two worlds collide and merge: non-nature and non-city. It is precisely these transitional, paradoxical places that particularly attract Mikhailov.

Even in the anti-aesthetics of residential districts, there lies a certain nostalgic appeal. It is no coincidence that views of post-Soviet housing estates are so popular in online communities—one can discern in them a utopia that never became reality, a nostalgia for a future that never arrived. New buildings, despite their "newness," already bear the marks of time, a patina of decay. In the precise words of Mikhail Yampolsky, they are "not-yet-destroyed 'ruins of modernity'." In this way, they unexpectedly converge with the genre of the 18th- and 19th-century Romantic landscape, from which the representatives of the New Topographics had distanced themselves—artists of that era often placed ancient ruins overgrown with grass in their paintings, lending the composition greater "picturesqueness."

Text: Nikita Slinkin (Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow)