I cooperate with reality, learn from it, take what suits me. As Yann Arthus-Bertrand said, "The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness." Right! What can we do! Everything has already been created! "You just have to live and life will give you pictures" - the very same Bresson. We only capture a moment of nature or of the material world - through the vision given to us from Above. And not we - the camera does it, and we just click.
Who are we anyway! We don't even know what we're made of, how, where we came from, much less where we're going to... Therefore, I am in debt to reality, not vice versa.
I need the energy of a volcano. That's why I felt so good in Kara-Dag, in Pamukkale, in the Sahara, in Montserat, in the Meteors... Unfortunately, I've never visited Belukha. I think I would have caught on there too. And the mundane - yes... It's hard...
My handwritten book is called "There is a way of the earth and a Way of Wings". The path of the earth is not my cup of tea, but the Path of the Wings is just right.
When I exhibit with artists, I can qualify for prizes, but on Viewbug.com, despite all the awards from moderators and fellow photographers on the site, I thought I would never win a competition - there are such panoramic shots, including those made from drones, the profi photographers make great studio pictures. And me... I'm only trying to create works of art with the help of not the most technically advanced camera, but the only one I can shoot with... and my favorite...
And suddenly... I am selected as a Contender for a Contest...
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/102086480
And they also write all sorts of commendable things...
Monument to Maya Plisetskaya, the great ballerina, in the square named after her in Central Moscow.
Contender in the Photography Awards at Viewbug.com. Art photo - Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen
Good news olgaslobodkinavonbromssen, We are delighted to recognize your extraordinary talent. Your photo has been selected as a Contender in the VIEWBUG Photography Awards. Your photograph stood out among many others, and that's awesome.
And again I entered the top 10% of the best photographers in the world... Like in 2022. Na-yeah... It's hard to believe.
The storyboard is also in. But that's more or less where I started. Things are a bit different now, but the storyboard's probably left. I have single works, series and compositions. There are whole exhibitions, i.e. displays connected by theme, color, etc. There are collections...
I'm trying to harmonize, but, apparently, there is nothing to seal the internal gaps...
And here's what the best and most famous art critics of Moscow, William Meyland and Natella Voiskunskaya, write about me.
And although 20 years have passed since then, it looks as if nothing is outdated... Neither my works of those times, nor these texts.
Today one speaks about the gender... I'm not very good at this. I understand - talented/mediocre, intellectual/dumb, boring/exciting, etc. While male and female... Well, there's probably something to it... In any case, not the way we were taught back in the Soviet times - that there is no difference between town and country, floor and ceiling, man and woman... but only between Marxism-Leninism and the machinations of imperialism...))) Joke!
Oh! I remember how I had an experiment with my students and just acquaintances. I gave them 10 poems from Japanese poetry - for them to guess the gender: who wrote it - a man or a woman. No one guessed, except for one English teacher. For some reason, she immediately realized who was who. For the purity of the experiment, I also gave my own poem... She read it and said, "I don't know. Probably, a monk wrote it..." Wise woman!
One playwright (from Koktebel) also indulged in speculating about male and female poetry. As a result, he gave out: "Marina Tsvetaeva wrote male poetry." Yeah, aaaaaah...
It's hard to imagine more feminine poetry. Apparently, he implied that bad poetry is written by women and good poetry - by men.
Male chauvinism is strong in our brother here, especially in an "advanced" one...))) Westerners seem to have already realized that we are more than equal.
As Ira Golitsyna, a friend of mine says: "And a man doesn't have to be very smart, otherwise it will already be a woman."))) But this is - ssh! hush!!! Between us, girls.
An aquaintance of mine, when he read my book "Youth Adventure Club", wrote to me: "Only one comma is missing there, the rest is OK. You must have had an A in Russian at school"... (???) At school? Of course, I had an A in both Russian and literature. But if it were just school, it would be half the trouble. That's what you have to make do with now:
However, Joseph Brodsky was not a male chauvinist. Such a level can no longer suffer from chauvinism. Joseph considered Tsvetaeva the best poet (not a poetess!) of the 20th century.
As for me, I prefer Mandelshtam and Akhmatova, but this is just to my liking.
Tsvetaeva's poetics is an extraordinary phenomenon. The construction of her poetic sheet is striking, especially in dramatic works. I watched "Phaedra" at the Pushkin Theater, then was reading the text for a long time...
And what Brodsky wrote to me still holds me. The point is - don't be afraid to be yourself! Great!!!
I'm listening to Vivaldi! It's brilliant! And completely out of gender. There is universal tenderness, subtlety, spirituality in this music...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75MEfUuMO70
Anyway, to be honest, this gender issue is already annoying. Why don't we wisely switch to another topic.)))
How I made a book about Grant* "Youth Adventure Club" - spontaneously. I just consistently registered the events of the project. (I write poetry in the same way - not knowing how I will start and how it will end. And make pictures off-hand too. I photograph what I see. And that's all there is to it. In the book I also added the memoirs of the participants of those events, whom I managed to persuade to write something about those times... Besides, I really wanted to know how things had been before my appearance in the club and in the training camp.
I strung other guys' essays on the column of my narrative... And this is my author's know-how.
Recently it occurred to me - funnily... When I was sending my "Art Nouveau Girl in a Cup of Coffee" to South Korea (I went into my study and suddenly my eyes were glued to a cup of coffee I had finished the day before, and this image was in it. I was just stunned and immediately took a picture of her! On the next day too. I should have lacquered that Girl so that she would remain in that cup forever...), so when I was sending her it occurred to me to start a new style - Random Images. I see them everywhere. In fact, I think, the souls of the people who left this material world are trying to express themselves in this way, to reveal themselves somehow... But maybe I'm wrong...
Anyway, here is this girl:
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/94689719
And here you will find her in my editing for the competition:
Recently, I accidentally opened one of Chagall's websites and immediately immersed myself in his extraordinary world, although the paintings were in the background, and in the foreground was his amazing portrait. I love him so much! His whole fantasy world is in his face, which makes you want to watch it endlessly...
When I came to The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts for his exhibition in the late 80s, I was physically pushed from picture to picture. They are not just imaginative, they are spiritual, like icons. Only in a different way.
And take Evgeny Rastorguev. I wrote about him in The Moscow Tribune or The Moscow Times in the mid-90s.
Chagall is illuminated, Rastorguev "centers things".
While both portray the world of little men. But, of course, it was Chagall who opened it for us. And not for us, he just painted his mind...
Am listening to instrumental music. Well, I can make sense of Grieg - "Pergunt". Norwegian folk motifs etc. But Wagner... Prelude to the opera "Tristan and Isolde"... He also wrote the libretto himself. And the " Ring of the Nibelung" is unspeakable! Over 100 instruments, male and female choir... etc.
"Oh, my God! How small I am!
This rock is floating - without a sail, without oars,
Obscuring half the sky..."
I have to put myself in quotes...
***
I got so carried away with this essay that I forgot my pains:
"Not lambada, but lumbago...
Sciatica and not Shiraz.
Oh, my Lord Jesus Christ!
Have some mercy on us!"
I'm quoting myself again. I wrote this last summer, but didn't download it - who needs these diseases! I'd be glad to get rid of them myself!
Am thinking about my CDs - poems with music. As my sponsor said, these discs can serve as relaxing psychotherapy in mental clinics and for the healthy people - you can listen to them in the car...
Not that I'm trying to convert everyone to a new faith - contemplative poetry, but I must distribute them. Worthy things. Judging from my own drone, so to speak.
As for my new style... RANDOM IMAGE ART - The art of random images. Oh! I have created my own new direction in art...
These seemingly random images can be serious, funny, scary. I delete the scary ones - they get into your system and start working like evil forces. But my "Girl in the Cup" is harmless. "Caterpillar" and "Warrior" too. Well, since I've come up with such a direction, I'll continue it, and then - who knows...
I've already talked about it... Once I was asked about my double compositions, if I know how I would connect them when I'm photographing...