Emptiness Beyond The Fall
by Laura Leonelli
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| La Republica Magazine,
Milan, Italy, Sept. 21, 1999 |
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One should begin with a cinema, maybe a drive-in, to feel the light terror caused by the sight of those virtual inhabitants of Mars, or Communists invading the peace of a remote city in the American country side, with its walls of wheat and velvet meadows. Then one should enter in a school, in that same imaginary but so real city, and read in the children books that cows, source of pasteurised and long maturity lives, will soon stop producing milk because the Russians are threatening with radiation and God knows what other evil tricks may come from the quiet life of the mammals.
This would be enough, together with the denunciation by Nikita Krushiov of Stalin’s purges, to understand, in that crucial 1956, year of birth of Anthony Suau, author of the exhibition “Beyond the Fall 1989-1999” - the climate, fears, expectations of an American child, young man, photographer, who at the age of 33 began, on the revolutionary wave of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a ten year long investigation sometimes requiring long stays in Russia. The exhibition is open until the 14th of November in the new rooms of the Spazio Oberdan in Milan, where also the splendid prints realised by Ilford with revolutionary techniques find their correct place.
What has Suau found beyond the fall that also divided his life? An absent enemy, an empty ring, embodied by the never ending Russian country side, the Romanian hills covered with wheat, the plough cultivated Bulgarian plains, the polluted lake incumbent on the background of the chimneys in Magnitogorsk. The exhibition, very strictly curated by Yuri Avvakumov, echoes a terrifying, wet, muddy atmospheric feeling of emptiness. Empty houses, televisions turned off, shop windows with nothing in but two lonely shirts, parades of insolently luxurious fridge recalling a richness from another world, flabby cartons ruined by a humidity shaping them in the absence of any content. And then disembowelled factories, bombed cities, lines of buildings, deserted streets; closed old administrative buildings, where Lenin’s picture is also disappearing from the walls.
A box, never filled, an enormous container for very few things.
Suau, Europe After The Wall Narrated In Black And White
1989-1999 In Milan the exhibition of the photographer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, that documents the post-communism revolution: from Russia to Bosnia
by Gianluigi Colin
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| Arte, Milan, Italy,
September 1999 |
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There he is, amongst his pictures, busy with the final touches of the exhibition, with his “good boy from Illinois” face, his brunet pony tail, the sneaking and detached eyes of a person who has seen a lot. Anthony Suau in fact has really seen a lot of things; he belongs to the generation of photographers (he was born in 1956) that have chosen photo reportage as a life style, as a necessity to witness the “present”. But Suau does it in an extraordinary way, without making a show of things, without easy aestheticisms. Everybody can have a confirmation of this 111 collection of pictures (another 400 are projected in a room) dedicated to the event symbolising the most significant political turn of the century: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The exhibition – organised by the Province of Milan, in co-operation with the agency Grazia Neri – presents the first important organic work ever realised on this event and on the political and social consequences caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Anthony Suau completely dedicated the past 10 years to exploring, documenting and providing evidence of this transformation. Suau’s eye, although representing big magazines like “Time” in places and situations that represent highly significant pieces of news (in Russia during the putsch, in Romania while Ceausescu was being executed, and then in Bosnia and Chechnya) never stopped on the pure piece of news created by the event, on the contrary he always tried to go “beyond” creating a symbolic vision, filled with emotions.
“The picture I like the most? None and all. It’s impossible to chose one picture, mine isn’t the narration of a single event, it’s the attempt to fix the history of the past ten years” Suau says. Then he adds: “It’s the visual testimony of post-communism. I did nothing but what I had to do: I documented it”
These words embody the great tradition of American reportage, but Suau’s sight gives us also something more: an in-depth in the lesson of history of art. It’s not a case that the images of this author (Pulitzer Award in 1994) also have an expressive charge that seems to originate from the authors of the past: “In Romania my references were Millet’s paintings”. Maybe this is why Suau’s work appears today as the most powerful and poetic black and white fresco of a world we still don’t know the outline of.
The East Ten Years After The Remains Of The Wall
At the Spazio Oberdan the dramatic reportage of Anthony Suau
by Anna Cirillo
Horror of war and ferocious ethnic conflicts, desperation of poverty annihilating human dignity, repulsion of ostentation of obscene richness. An American reportage from the East: little joy, almost none; huge pain and a terrible sense of guilt, mixed with bewilderment at the sight of the fatigue of everyday life. Even after the fall of the Wall.
For ten years, from 1989 to 1999, the eye of the American reporter Anthony Suau researched the Soviet Union and the Countries of the former block; documenting human and political upsets, life styles, epic changes, daily situations. Winning a Pulitzer Prize for a reportage on the Ethiopian famine, this forty-three year old, with long hair in a pony tail, and with a bright look capable of observing, understanding and transmitting, arrives in Italy, where he is not very famous, supported by the agency Grazia Neri.
He is hosted by the exhibition “Beyond the Fall”, organised by the Province in the Spazio Oberdan, opened at the same time in Washington and destined to go all around the world. Very tender and melancholy, never detached, Suau has that sensibility that makes photography an art: the ability of seeing the exquisitely photographic, but not glorified, beauty of images, together with a ethical feeling of a civil denunciation.
On the route, that has characterised the ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the East, he makes pictures and narrates History. He was there when Ceausescu, the grotesque and ferocious dictator, lost his power and life; when the coup in Russia shook the blood of the world in 1991; when Sarajevo was besieged in 1994. He travels in Chechnya, Georgia and Bosnia; he documents the economic fall of the ex-Soviet Union, gripped amongst the Mafia, consumerism and widespread poverty. But he also catches and fixes in his lenses small daily lives forever, personal dramas; nothing can explain better than some of his pictures (mostly black and white) the miserable and annihilated existence of the elderly in Moscow. An exhibition not to be missed and that will not fade in your memory. Suau not only is interesting, but he also has the character of a real photographer, able to surprise and hit the target. He has the ability to shake the sensibility of those who come across his work.