Rarely Viewed Russian Photographs at Michael Hoppen Gallery
LONDON.- Michael Hoppen Gallery presents a unique selection of rarely viewed Russian photographs:
Boris Savelev was born in the Ukraine in 1948 and moved to Moscow in 1966. He is a graduate of the Institute of Aeronautics and joined the Moscow photography club Novator in 1970. He became a full time photographer since 1982and has had numerous exhibitions worldwide. He is one of the best-knownphotographers working in Russia today. Savelev’s work is about light and form-not people, but his images retain a peculiarly Russian sensibility.
Nikolay Bakharev was born in 1946 in Mikhailovka, in the Russian region of Altai. Aged 4, he was placed in an orphanage after both his parentsdied, where he remained until he was 16. After a period working as a mechanic in a metallurgy plant, he began his career as a photographer. His workbridges a gap between documentary, eroticism and socialcommentary. Although intimate, it would be wrong to regard his images as home-spun eroticism. His photographs are of individuals like himself- from the same background and circumstances, living through the same period of political change. At the moment the shutter closes however, he has separated himself fromhis subject’s portrayals of beauty, love and sex. By removing himself from his surroundings, he exposes his greater comprehension, and detachment.
Relationship #72, Novokuznetsk, Russia. Vintage silver gelatin print, 30 x 30 cm. © Nikolay Bakharev courtesy Michael Hoppen Contemporary
Jan Lukas is a noted Czech photographer, who was born in Ceske Budejovi on September 13, 1915. He was active from the 1930s-1970s. Afterworking in his homeland and Russia, Lukas photographed Italy, and Pompeii in1963 and then went on to visit New York City in 1964, but most of his New York City images were made in the 1970s after he moved to New York. He often quoted Mark Twain, “New York is not America, but the world,” adding,”When you walk around Manhattan with a camera, you’ll find images which can very well be from Naples, Hong Kong, Tel-Aviv, San Juan, or even Calcutta.In New York you can find just about anything. Just like me. I’m finding Pompeiiin Manhattan.” His images appeared in such influential exhibition as the1933 II Mezinarodni Fotograficky Salon V, the 1964 World Exhibition of Photography: What Is Man?, which was sponsored by Stern Magazine, theInternational Exhibition of Photography–The Camera as Witness held at the Montreal Expo ’67 and the groundbreaking 1989 show on Czech Modernism:1900-1945 held at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. His most recent show washeld in August 2006 in the Prague Castle Gardens. It was entitled “JanLukas: New York–Pompeii. His work is held in many museum and institutional collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum ofModern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the International Center of Photography, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Rose Art Museum and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
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