VOLGA

The Volga

Idle lifeguard towers, beach umbrellas blanketed in snow, a shark washed ashore (part of a playground) — all these objects, out of season, find themselves stripped of their purpose. Suspended in time, captured by the camera, they cease to be functional elements and become anonymous sculptures — the term Bernd and Hilla Becher used to describe industrial architecture in their typologies.

It was the Surrealists who first noticed this property of photography: its ability to transform the perception of reality while maintaining the illusion of its objective representation. In this context, one recalls their beloved concept of unheimlich, which Sigmund Freud wrote about in his eponymous essay. This word is usually translated as "uncanny," but in this case, it is more accurate to speak of the unsettling feeling of vague (non-)recognition. We have seen these objects before, but only now — in the absence of people, in the silence, in the absence of presence — do we notice their other, spectral side. Thanks to photography, the most ghostly of the arts.

Ivan Mikhailov has been working on this series since 2012. In his words, walks with a camera along the Volga bank have become an almost meditative experience — "an attempt to escape into the silence from the endless information catastrophe of the world we live in." This is felt particularly acutely in the photographs taken after the pandemic: if before people might appear in the frame, now they have almost disappeared. The photographer himself speaks of an internal barrier that arose between him and strangers during that period — and has only intensified since.

Here, the Volga is not merely a geographical feature. It becomes a boundary between nature and civilization, a natural barrier against urban expansion. As in many of Mikhailov's other projects, the focus is on borderlands, transitional spaces where man and nature meet. The Volga changes with the cycle of the year: swelling, shallowing, freezing, breaking free of ice. These changes are repetitive, predictable, embedded in the natural cycle. The surrounding city, in contrast, changes differently: irreversibly, irrevocably, linearly. And against the backdrop of this constant fluidity of the river, one feels particularly keenly how irretrievably time slips away in the human world.

Text: Nikita Slinkin (Moscow Multimedia Art Museum)