Alexey (Aleksey, Alexis, Alexei) Viktorovich Titarenko (born November 25, 1962; ) is a Soviet Union-born American photographer and artist. He lives and works in New York City.Robertson, Rebecca "Bringing Shadows to Life. Alexey Titarenko" Art News, New York City, June 2014, page 54-57Corcoran, Sean, Museum of the City of New York "The City at the Edge of the New World"; in Titarenko, The City is a Novel, Damiani, 2015, pages 162-163, Alexey Titarenko: ‘I wanted to capture my inner perception of the world around me’ A Publication of the Studio International, written by Nathasha Kurchanova, accessed January 21, 2018
Biography Titarenko was born in Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia. His mother survived the Siege of Leningrad and later became a mathematician. His father was born at the Gulag camp Karlag in Kazakhstan, near Karaganda where his parents were deported to by bolsheviks from Russia during collectivization. He later became a coal mining engineer in his home town Karaganda, Kazakhstan. They were both students of Leningrad University.Ksenia Nuril. "Spheres of influence" pages 17-24 from "Nomenklatura of Signs" Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2020. ISBN 978-88-6208-699-8.City of Shadows" in The City is a Novel / Alexey Titarenko, Damiani, 2015, pages 15-36, At age 15, Alexey Titarenko became the youngest member of the independent photo club Zerkalo (Mirror).ZERKALO: Forever After, The State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO, St.Petersburg, Russia, 2017, page 17, 38, 41, 42, 124-127, 271, 272, 292, 322 He went on to graduate with honors from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad's Institute of Culture.Dictionnaire mondial de la photographie Paris, Éditions Larousse, 1994, page 629, William Meyers. "Alexey Titarenko's Venetian Style." The New York Sun, April 24, 2008
Influenced by the Russian avant-garde works of Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and the Dada art movement (from the early 20th century), his series of collages and photomontages, created by superposing several negatives, Nomenklatura of Signs (first exhibited in 1988, in Leningrad, and later same year, in Drouart gallery, Paris, France) is a commentary on the Communist regime as an oppressive system that converts citizens into mere signs.Dictionnaire mondial de la photographie Paris, Éditions Larousse, 1994, page 629, Schwendener, Martha "A city's artistic rebellion. Photographs and other works that pushed boundaries in late-cold-war Leningrad." The New York Times, June 2, 2013"Underground Russian photography 1970s–1980s" The New Yorker, March 19, 2012Meyers, William. "Shades of Reality. Underground Russian photography in 1970s–1980s" The Wall Street Journal March 10–11, 2012 In 1989, Nomenklatura of Signs was included in Photostroika, a major show of new Soviet photography that toured the US.Sartorti, Rosalinde (1989). "No more heroic tractors: Subverting the legacy of socialist realism." Pp 8–17 of Richardson, Nan; Hagen Charles (1989). Photostroika: New Soviet Photography. Aperture 116. New York: Aperture Foundation. . Nomenklatura of Signs: Alexey Titarenko. Damiani, 2019.
During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991–1992, he produced several series of photographs about the human condition of ordinary people living on its territory and the suffering they endured then and throughout the twentieth century. To illustrate links between the present and the past, he created metaphors by introducing long exposure, blur, and intentional camera movement into street photography.William Meyers "Two Tales of Two Cities" New York Sun March 2, 2006, page 15William Meyers. "A Master of Technique." The Wall Street Journal, March 13–14, 2010Gabriel Bauret "Fragments of the discourse on a photographic oeuvre" Alexey Titarenko photographs / Gabriel Bauret essay, Nailya Alexander, Washington D.C. 2003, pages 20, 26, 30, 34, 40, 42. Sources have noted that his most important innovation is the way he uses long exposure.Pollack, Barbara. "Alexey Titarenko." Art News, April 2010, page 108A.-D. Bouzet. "Saint Petersburg en Ombre et Blanc." Libération, Paris, July 21, 2002The Elements of Photography. Understanding and Creating Sophisticated Images. Oxford, Elsevier, 2008, page 200-205, Tim Smith "Black, White, Grey Titarenko's photos in new exhibit are eerily timeless and bleak" The Baltimore Sun, June 1, 2012 John Bailey, in his essay about Garry Winogrand and Titarenko, mentioned that one of the obstacles that he surmounted successfully was being too visible himself and, as a consequence, people's possible reaction to his presence altering the authenticity of the image." Street-Wise: The Photography of Garry Winogrand and Alexey Titarenko " American Cinematographer. An International Publication of the ASC, accessed January 21, 2018 Glueck, Grace "Northern Light." The New York Times, New York, March 24, 2006Ollman, Leah. "Russian Photos Trace Images of Mortality and Memory." Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2001
Titarenko's best-known series from this period is City of Shadows (which is also a title of his autobiographical novel),"City of Shadows" in The City is a Novel / Alexey Titarenko, Damiani, 2015, pages 15-36, whose urban landscapes reiterate the Odesa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin Stairs) scene from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin.Protzman, Ferdinand. Landscape. Photographs of Time and Place. National Geographic, 2003, page 84-86, Inspired by the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Titarenko also translated Dostoevsky's vision of the Russian soul into sometimes poetic, sometimes dramatic pictures of his native city, Saint Petersburg. Intitled "Les Quatres Mouvements de Saint Petersbourg" by French art historian, writer and curator Gabriel Bauret, these photographs were exhibited, as Titarenko's solo show curated by Gabriel Bauret, at the Rencontres d'Arles 2002 in Reattu Museum (Arles, France).Guerrin, Michel. "Alexey Titarenko, clair-obscure." Le Monde, Paris, February 22, 2003Bouruet-Aubertot, Veronique "La Cite des Ombres." Beaux-Arts magazine, Paris, February 2003Aidan Dunne. "Camera in a City of Shadows." Irish Times, Dublin, May 5, 2007
Along with Alexander Sokurov's 2002 film Russian Ark, the City of Shadows exhibition (which now included photographs from the mid and late 1990s inspired by Dostoevsky's novels) was a part of the program celebrating the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg at the 2003 Clifford Symposium, in Middlebury, VT: What Became of Peter's Dream? Petersburg in History and ArtsDiane E. Foulds. "Revisiting the world of the Romanovs." Boston Sunday Globe, Boston, November 2, 2003 The Russian Ark and the City of Shadows have one similarity: both are based on the experimental innovation: Alexander Sokurov using a single, very long – 96 minutes sequence shot and Titarenko's several minutes long exposure for some of his photographs.Higgins, Jackie. The World Atlas of Street Photography. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2014, pages 226–229, , Ian Haydn Smith. The Short Story of Photography. Laurence King Publishing, London, 2018, page 209, ,
In his photographs from Venice, mostly taken between 2001 and 2008, Titarenko uses "... a highly stylized technic that he put deftly in a service of strongly determined vision." Moreover, "Venice also offers him a reminiscence of Saint Petersburg, similar to a recollection found in the work of Marcel Proust, who, in Albertine disparue (The Fugitive), recounts during his Venetian sojourn that he cannot resist comparisons to Combray."Bauret, Gabriel "The Theatre and its Wings"; in Titarenko The City is a Novel, Damiani, 2015, page 104, Venice, Italy creates a counterbalance, a point of comparison with Venice of the North where he was born - Saint Petersburg.Tim, Smith "Fascinating exhibit of photographs, smoke drawings at Grimaldis"; The Baltimore Sun, June 25, 2013Bret, McCabe "Venice by Alexey Titarenko" Baltimore City Paper, June 19, 2013 In Titarenko's photographs, like in Proust's writings, " ... what matters is less the scrupulous description of reality than a particular vision it renders."
Titarenko creates his prints in a darkroom. Critics have called him a master of the darkroom technique.Bauret, Gabriel "La Ville est un Roman"; in Titarenko, The City is a Novel, Damiani, 2015, pages 10-11, Selective bleaching and toning (often done by brush) add depth to his palette of grays. Like Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, Titarenko uses so-called pseudo-solarization, but unlike his predecessors, he exposes the print to light during the developing process mostly at the edges and in a subtle way that lowers the contrast and creates a very particular kind of gray silver 'veil'. In order to emphasize the dramatic aspects of the City of Shadows series, he sometimes combines the Sabattier effect with adjacency effect created during development, called the Mackie line.Hugues, Sylvie "Alexey Titarenko, esthetique et documentaire." Response Photo magazine n.132, Paris, France, March 2003, page 80-89
Through interviews, lectures, books, curated exhibitions and two documentaries by French-German TV channel Arte (2004, 2005), Titarenko describes a particular vision of an artist and of Art, close to that of Marcel Proust, linked to literature, poetry and classical music (especially that of Dmitri Shostakovich), placing himself far apart from contemporary tendencies developing particularly in Moscow.Aspects de la photographie Russe (Aspects of Russian photography) Nice Musées, Nice, France, 2002, page 86, 130–133, 151,
A 2011 exhibition of 15 gelatin silver prints from his Havana, Cuba series (2003-2006) in the J. Paul Getty Museum group show, A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now, linked Titarenko's approach to street photography in contemporary Havana to that of Walker Evans in 1933, by the subjects he photographed and aspects of his printing.Johnson, Reed. "Cuba under the lens at the Getty Museum." Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2011Brett, Abbott "Waiting to Awake"; in Titarenko, The City is a Novel, Damiani, 2015, pages 132-133, "Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko" American Cinematographer. An International Publication of the ASC, accédé le 21 janvier 2018
Titarenko became a naturalized United States citizen in 2011; and lives and works in New York City as an artist, photographer, and printer.Burnstine, Susan "Connection American." Black&White photography magazine, United Kingdom, June 2010, page 20, 21"Alexey Titarenko", The New Yorker magazine, May 11, 2015
His work in New York continues today. "Using long exposure and darkroom technique, his goal is still to create a print that expresses his experience when creating the image ... paint with symbols, lifting them to the surface from the murk of reality. It should not be surprising, then, that Titarenko's vision of New York resonates with the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn and Alfred Stieglitz - men who strived to embody the dynamism of the city and its people in photographs at the turn of the twentieth century. As Titarenko's relationship with New York grows and changes, so too will the photographs he creates. It is the nature of his working methods."
Publications Publications by Titarenko The Photographs from the Cycle Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg. Soros Center for Contemporary Art / Open Society Institute, St Petersburg, 1997. With an essay in Russian and English by Georgy Golenky, Senior Research Curator at the Russian State Museum, St.Peterburg.The essay can be viewed as a PDF here within Titarenko's site. Alexei Titarenko. Toulouse, France: Galerie Municipale de Château d'Eau, 2000. . City of Shadows. Saint Petersburg, Russia: Art-Tema, 2001. . Alexey Titarenko, Photographs. Washington D.C.: Nailya Alexander, 2003. . The City is a Novel. Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2015. . Nomenklatura of Signs. Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2020. .