Attitude towards photography has changed significantly. Against the backdrop of a total loss of faith in any non-pragmatic values, ascetic devotion to creativity as a whole is perceived as a manifestation of schizophrenia, a form of madness. The social situation tyrannically turns masters into crude craftsmen.
Sometimes working for daily bread on absolutely uninteresting editorial assignments, I feel this myself. A typical situation: twenty photographers shoot some event from one point for twenty different publications. Newspapers, in the end, impartially reflect this cult of photo pragmatics. The photos can be shown as an illustration of collective impersonality.
I cannot come to terms with the world that surrounds us today. Get used to everyday betrayals, rampant, manic envy. The main thing is the apostasy from one’s own views and ideals under the “pressure of circumstances.” Difficult times are not a reason for a radical change in life principles. Quartering conscience is the death of the artist. His natural state is rebellion. Permanent rebellion. Not to become a conformist, not to level with the crowd. Many of my colleagues, smelling money, rushed into advertising photography. Not only does it create a distorted, fictional, illusory picture of the world, but it also contains an element of fascism, discrimination against those people whose forms do not meet the standards of top models. If I realize this, I must create anti-advertising photography, record reality as truthfully as possible in its unheroic, unshowy manifestation, depict, if you will, ordinary people. One of my friends recently tore to pieces a photograph given to him from my old series — “Schoolgirls.” He says that this shot awakened memories of times when he was happy. In fact, he strives to destroy the memory of himself. This is how tragedy manifests itself today. Mundane, melancholy.
“When I look at your shots, I don’t want to live,” I recently heard from a colleague. I think such a judgment is a fact of moral deafness. By anatomizing violence, aggression, cruelty in some of my works, I do not glorify but expose them. Yes, I strive to evoke disgust in the viewer for what seems to me vile, vulgar in life. My method could be defined as affirming the norm, beauty, humanity by the opposite. The subject of the image for me is what outrages, causes mental discomfort, despair. Dirt, stupidity, vanity of the world. In general, if you seriously engage in photography, you constantly look at the world as if through the viewfinder of a camera. Even without a camera, you constantly see many situations containing ready, complete artistic plots. Documentary, but at the same time absurd, surrealistic or mannerist. Even for staged, modeled shots, the primary thing remains the immediate life impulse. However, when “setting the frame,” I do not aim to reproduce a situation that I did not manage to “catch” in life. These are documentary images of subconscious, secret desires, hidden passions, micro-studies of sensual and psychological moments that a person forbids himself to show openly.
I look at life as a theater in which actors constantly improvise their roles. Today, two contrasting groups have clearly formed in society, between which there is an abyss. What separates these groups is not material wealth at all. Simply, most of the population has mimicked, immersed themselves in exclusively material concerns, lost any metaphysical landmarks, and senselessly perform the despotic ritual of everyday life. But there are other individuals. They have accepted the surrounding horror as a given but want to live by their own rules. They are not afraid to be themselves — to seem strange or ugly, to boldly express their feelings, to unreservedly rejoice when their heart is happy, and not to show fake-happy grimaces when they are sad. I, although it may seem paradoxical, still address my works to the first, “zombified” group. I hope that my photos can make them “relax,” break through the shell of their dependent, determined ideas and habits formed by society, remove the veil of banality from their eyes. Perhaps they will be lucky to see the theater of life, and they will begin to boldly play the roles given to them by nature, fate, rather than wait for a prompter to suggest the text or a director to mark out the scenes.Comment type: Published comment
Author: Mykola Trokh
Bibliography:
NIKOLAI TROKH. PART 2. “MANIFESTO” [Electronic resource] // Magazine “NASH”. – 2009. – Access mode to the resource: http://www.nashizdat.com/blog/photo/25.html.
Sources: Apology. Existential-polylogical aconceptual project Courier-muse. Manifestos, declarations, monologues / ed. Vasyliev Serhiy – Kyiv, 1996. – 16 p.
