Gold & mushrooms
photography and some more art from Alexandra Soldatova
Our Trip
Self-published, edition of 50
Minsk, Belarus, 2016
19×11,5 cm, 36 pages, hardcover, handbinded
available for order
Minsk, Belarus, 2016
19×11,5 cm, 36 pages, hardcover, handbinded
available for order
Late at night а photo album was literally melting in my hands. The sheets of cardboard were turning into waves, the glue, destroyed by the flea market fog in Brussels, was dissolving and the photographs were sticking off the pages.
It is the album seen as a story, as travel records – a holiday spent by a young Belgian couple in Mallorca in 1956. They had one camera for two, they were photographing each other, at the same place they bought the album and after returning home filled it in with the photographs.
The pictures seemed too simple to me, and the album itself – full of clichés and thus boring, but at the same time it was a bit enviable and genuine – a document of happiness, a finished product, made clearly to remember it forever.
It is the album seen as a story, as travel records – a holiday spent by a young Belgian couple in Mallorca in 1956. They had one camera for two, they were photographing each other, at the same place they bought the album and after returning home filled it in with the photographs.
The pictures seemed too simple to me, and the album itself – full of clichés and thus boring, but at the same time it was a bit enviable and genuine – a document of happiness, a finished product, made clearly to remember it forever.
I wanted to do something that might in the same way capture, pin with a needle my own happiness to a specific moment in time. I decided to use the 60-years-old rules of the game: photographs, postures, places.
It is a simple game that at the body level takes me out of the definite moment of the document into the space of alien relations, so similar to any other ones. The more I transform, the more scrupulously I observe and participate in each photograph, the more obvious substitution becomes, a strange old game and the falseness of the entire structure on the whole. Action and its tangible result make something that was obvious at the very beginning real and we are forced to accept it.
It is a simple game that at the body level takes me out of the definite moment of the document into the space of alien relations, so similar to any other ones. The more I transform, the more scrupulously I observe and participate in each photograph, the more obvious substitution becomes, a strange old game and the falseness of the entire structure on the whole. Action and its tangible result make something that was obvious at the very beginning real and we are forced to accept it.
