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'Psychological Portraits' of the CIS: The Photography of Anatoly Petrenko
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10609 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
2,028 Words |
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Stephen Henkin
Stephen Henkin is an arts editor for The World & I. |
In 1989, Anatoly Petrenko fled the Soviet Union just as the Iron Curtain was beginning to lift. In the summer of 1992, he returned to his homeland, now the Commonwealth of Independent States, to photograph people caught in the transition from "the familiar past to the unknown future," as he describes it. Indeed, Petrenko's approach is central to the significant photographic work being done in the CIS today, whereby a diverse range of styles and techniques seek to articulate vision appropriate to the radical social and economic changes occurring there. As with his peers, Petrenko focuses on the very essence of the human experience--the insecurity in the eyes of a wayward youth, the staunch stoicism of a peasant woman, the hopelessness of orphans--to document this historic transition.
Petrenko, currently taking photographic course work at the San Francisco Art Institute, took advantage of an academic break last year to create a striking portfolio of psychological portraiture, giving special insight into the mind and behavior of people in Latvia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. "It was a poignant moment to witness devastation and uncertainty crawling into people's lives," Petrenko said. "I saw women as being the main strength of the society. There was a power in the way they carry on the burden of poverty and discomfort, hoping for the better to come."
Petrenko's method flows out of the grand tradition of Soviet-based "reality" photography championed by such artists as Alexander Rodchenko, Arkady Shaikhet, and Sergei Eisenstein, who, beginning in the decade following the October Revolution, went beyond merely reflecting events to actually constructing them. During this period of artistic flowering, art served as a metaphor for a dynamic social and political reality. However, when Stalin's Five Year Plans were implemented in the 1930s to bring immense economic and social change, the artistic climate in Russia changed. Administrative decrees suppressed all forms of experimental expression, including photography.
Reality-based images, once crushed by the rise of Stalinism, have now resurfaced in an attempt to redefine the past while making sense out of the nation's tangled web of history. Just as post-October Revolution photographers used their brief period of artistic freedom to reform the lies and clichés promoted under authoritarian rule, so Petrenko and his contemporaries seek to promote a more truthful picture than the one propagated during the decades of Soviet propaganda, terror, and abuse.
Petrenko's own formative years bore the
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