TV6
We calmly respond to all the horror of the everyday life: wars, criminal Razborki, absence of law, poverty, drunkenness, economic and ecological catastrophes. Understandable for a foreigner our specific way of living, our strange habits (taken out of the life context) look very important in the photographs of Anthony Suau. It comes out that since the fall of the Berlin Wall we didn’t move from our place, nothing has changed in us and around us.
“I liked very much to travel in your country. During these trips I met and talked to very many open and intelligent people, but it was painful to see the circumstance in which they live.” -- Anthony Suau
Attempts of the foreigners to understand our life always seemed naive to us, because we feel that we know and understand better what happens in our backyard, but there is something in Suau’s photos, sincerity and truth, which is what we lost on the way to our bright future.
Anthony Suau is the model for the Western reporter, he is always in the right place, at the right time. He has made a few historical images such as the photograph of the very lonely Yeltsin in the Kremlin. Anthony Suau is very professional. But from the Western documentaries and articles we expect something special and unusual, and here we see only the things we know. So we shrug our shoulders. But Anthony Suau shot not for us, he shot about us.
He says that he envies us because the problems which we face are real and difficult and people are more natural.
In the photograph there is always a borderline between the subjectivity of the picture and the objectivity of the eye. And we always think that we look better in life then we appear in the picture. So if photographs are always too democratic, too truthful, then it is not Suau’s fault that his photographs are the graveyard of hope of eastern Europe. But Suau does not idealize the West. He shot in Bosnia and Kosovo and does not like politicians in the East or the West.
“You think I did not have problems with censorship,” says Anthony Suau, “ Of course, I had. Like during the first years of reforms in Russia I photographed in the provinces and no one was using my images because they wanted a positive view, but later when there was a war in Chechnya and the economic crisis, everyone was surprised. However my camera witnessed everything before.”
But photography which divides time by moments turns reality into history. This did not stop with the fall of the Berlin wall.
CULTURE CHANNEL
Anthony Suau is a brilliant photographer and real artist. He has a specific view on modern Russia.
If in 1965 a photojournalist from Itar TASS would have been sent to America to photograph the failures of capitalism he would shoot something similar. In modern Russia Suau saw only poverty, dirt, wars...etc., however he shot what he saw as a real master.
Everything is bad, hungry old women, empty shelves, refugees...etc... the country is turned into a giant flea-market. This is Russia in the beginning of the 90’s in the eyes of Anthony Suau. He is very straight forward. He sees only black or white. Poverty is a contrast to the luxury of bandits. Images of the victims of the first Chechen campaign are next to the pictures of the victims of contract killings.
“Banditism and Mafia are depicted on a background of beautiful landscapes and beautiful people. That should be a reason for positive feelings because not everything is so bad,” says Yuri Avvakumov the curator and designer of all Anthony Suau’s exhibitions, in Milan, Washington, and Berlin. “Not so long ago the exhibition was open in London and it has a great success there.”
Anthony Suau is a winner of prestigious contests and his photographs have appeared on the pages on TIME magazine. At the beginning of the 90’s, the famous American weekly magazine sent the photographer to the ex-socialist countries.
“He sincerely loves Russia and to evaluate this love the exhibition he presents to Russia as a gift and this gift is worth $150,000”, says curator Yuri Avavkumov. “This includes everything; the crates, frames and prints that are made from the most advanced technology.”
American Anthony Suau has never seen the magazine “The Soviet Union” where his homeland was shown as the world of profiteering and in a similar unappealing way.
The photographer sincerely objects to the accusation of over simplifying. “I do not know that magazine you are speaking of but in America there is a middle class while in Russia the difference between the rich and poor is extreme. And the number of poor in Russia is much larger,” - says Suau.
One of the astonishment’s of Anthony Suau was during the Chechen war 1995 where he was from the beginning. At the opening ceremony of the exhibition in Moscow Anthony Suau said, “The things could have gone wrong for him if not his fixer Andrei Polikonov.” Foreigners call their fixers, assistants who help them in hot spots.
Polikonov say, “when we were in Grozny with artillery intelligence troops I once had to bring Anthony down by force to ground when he was the aim of a sniper.” These stories didn’t diminish his desires to shoot Russia and other countries of eastern Europe.
Anthony Suau is still trying to understand why the world, without the wall, is not improving. Why were some contradictory perceptions replaced by the other contradictory perceptions and the East did not go along with the West? The confrontation is continuing and Suau is documenting it.
Not to offend the Russian viewers, he removed some of his images from the Moscow exhibition. Like the image of a man crushed by a Russian tank in Grozny. Polikonov says, “You know it was like in a cartoon when someone is crushed by a steam roller. We saw a similar thing, a man crushed by tanks which drove over and over the corpse again so it was very flat. You could not tell if it was Chechen or federal soldier.”
You can see this picture in New York where his exhibition is going to open in five days.