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ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENTIgor Posner
Notes from Underground
It started in 2006, a year when I returned to St. Petersburg for the first time in 14 years. At the time I had no idea what I wanted to get out of this place, photographically anyway. I just knew that I wanted to immerse myself into its cold, gloomy winter and take pictures. Trip after trip as images started to appear I noticed that somehow the pictures started to reconstruct this city’s heavy, yet poetic soul, like captured by Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, Bely, Brodsky and others.
Excerpt from a personal diary (February, 2008):
“Leningrad creates a feeling of a lost and a haunted city, an open nerve, where little tragedies of every day life that seem universal are so acutely brought to surface…with its bars, streets, drunks, communal apartments this place creates a sense of an inexistent dream within an authentic nightmare, and yet paradoxically conveys a feeling of poetic nostalgia and melancholy.”
Images used in this slideshow are chapter fragments from a book project about St. Petersburg (2006-2009) – “Notes from Underground” (working title).
Music by Alfred Schnittke – In Memoriam II, tempo di valse
Special thanks to: Olya Vysotskaya, Anna Bocharova
Bio
Born in St. Petersburg (former Leningrad), Russia, Igor Posner moved to Los Angeles, California in the early 90s. Early work includes photographs taken in south-central and downtown Los Angeles, Tijuana, Mexico. Igor returned to Russia in 2006, taking up photography full time.
In 2007, Igor moved from Los Angeles to New York City. At present, he lives between St. Petersburg, Russia and New York. Currently he works on two series: first, about Russian immigrant communities in Brooklyn and LA, and second, about former Jewish ghetto settlements in Russia, Western Ukraine and Belarus.
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Editor’s note:
please only one comment per essay….
-david alan harvey
amazingly haunting and moving set of photos from Russia
