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| Photo Magazine,
Moscow, Russia, March 3, 2000 |
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..He is different from other courageous reporters not only by the number of the prestigious international awards (starting with the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his images of “Famine in Ethiopia”) but also by the fact he takes a human and social prospective.
..It’s understandable why he decided to show the exhibition in Washington, Milan, Berlin, London, and New York. That is because he believes few people really understand the truth about Russia in those countries. However it is hard to imagine that his pictures would add to the image of the frightening and impoverished Russia with its sleek-living bandits and starving miners which is an all too common Western perspective of our country.
However in some of his pictures, Suau achieves this level of abstraction when no matter what is in the photographs they are a pleasure to look at.
For example he can shoot a militia raid on a Moscow food market as if it was a Soviet styled sportsmen’s parade on the Red Square.Albanian pyramid investors, in his image, look like ancient centaurs in their own beautiful way, a mixture of heads and backs. Some images are as articulate and simplistic in their style as those of the great prewar European photographers such as; Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, or Margaret Burke-White.
What is amazing is that all the new Russian horrors were shot by the American who at the beginning of 90’s went to Eastern Europe to capture the triumph of the democratic transformations and finished by objectively being on the side of its rivals...
But even from that point, the exhibition, which looks at first to be a series of banalities is in fact an artistic provocation. The viewer has two possibilities- to turn away like a capricious beauty from the unfortunate portrait, blaming it all on the photographer. Or to be courageous enough to look at ourselves through the unengaged eyes of a stranger. It could be that Suau is not so one-sided and that, in fact, he captured the most important of what happens here?
Photos: Aged Ten-Years.
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| Vlast magazine,
Moscow, Russia, Feb. 15, 2000 |
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... these photos could be held as evidence by an opposition against the Yeltsin-Gorbachov gang.
Of course, Suau’s exhibition can be regarded as a encyclopedia of all the imaginable post-totalitarian themes, all the cliché themes. We are victims of communist ideology, victims of the financial pyramids, and victims of criminal conflict...
You have to remember that you are seeing Eastern Europe through the eyes of a man who not only comes from the West but from another continent. This is a perspective of a total stranger.
This perspective is primitive from one side (what do they understand?) but complicated enough (what do we understand of what they understand?). We sort of understand where we live and the attempt of the stranger to understand the mysteries of our life may be naive. But the foreigner has the right to be naive while we cannot.
Suau is sincere which makes his naiveté somewhat of an artistic method. He shoots what is exciting for himself. Many of his discoveries are routine for us but the fact is that Suau chooses these items and gives them an important place in his final presentation. From the outsiders view these familiar aspects of our life look not just interesting but very fundamental. Our fantastically strange life style, our bizarre rituals, our funny and terrible heroes, open up only in his interpretation.
The existential horror of Russian everyday life presents itself in Suau’s work. Exploding our daily routine by ignoring and not seeing this horror. Our resistance is totally understandable but it stops us from feeling how hot is the spice of life here. Extorting fear and surprise from our consciousness we lose the sense of life around us and us in that life.
..It is easy to feel bitterness over the destruction of ideals in the works of Anthony Suau. Life beyond the wall turned out to be the same but more dirty, poor and bitter. But this is only one side of the perception. The other is that in the reminisce of eastern empires, something scary and interesting appeared.
Life there is boiling and foaming. Hell knows what happens there. Life is not respected there, there are no laws, no shame, no guilt, and no sense. We feel in his works, his affection to this frightful life. In the country’s decay, he sees an esthetic phenomena. The experience which he was lucky to live through we get, with a generous hand and for free.
INTERVIEW
What is the difference in the way your photographs are perceived in the East and in the West?
Western people, especially Americans, are not completely aware of what has happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in the last decade. This, to me, is extremely dangerous.
Don’t you think that your themes are already covered in magazines and newspapers?
My photographs and themes were rarely published in Western newspapers and magazines in the past few years of the transition, particularly not in America. These magazines were looking for more sensational stories - political scandals etc. My portrayal of industrial life in Norilsk, for example, which is one of the most horrendous and impoverished conditions imaginable, was a subject that was not interesting to them.
Only social extremes are captured in your photographs - beggars and nouveau-riche. Why don’t you have any middle class?
Because the middle class does not really exist in Russia. I don’t refer to Moscow, because Moscow is an island, it is set apart from Russia. But in Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka the middle class is non-existent. Of that, I am sure. The West and the East are now blaming each other for this situation. Since Kosovo and Chechnya this situation has escalated. This seems very dangerous to me. Recently it appears that anti-Western and anti-Eastern propaganda are having a rebirth in both the East and in the West.
Don’t you think that you are part of it?
My interest is not money, or politics but journalism. I believe that both the Western and the Russian government should take their share of responsibility for what has happened to Russia. It’s hard to comprehend why a country such as Russia, rich in both natural and human resources, is in such catastrophic condition. And it is this catastrophe that I would like to draw attention to with my project. The 100 photographs which are were edited for the exhibited are not the best images I have made in the East in the past 10 years. They are the images, which when assembled together, I personally believe communicate that statement.
I am not overly considering with photographic style or form. What I am attempting to do primarily is to communicate through photography, style and form are secondary. I want people who look at these images in 30 or 40 years and say, “that is how it was”. This is the challenge ... knowing which moments will honestly sustain history.