• persona non grata

 

The Persona non grata project can be considered a complex collective portrait of my contemporaries who are not compatible with the System -- the System, in which they were born and in which they are forced to continue their lives.

The Persona non grata series includes different nude, semi-nude and so-called "ordinary" portraits of people, in which the degree of their nudity can probably be used as an indicator of a model's frankness during such a photographic confession. The majority of pictures were taken inside the real interiors without any staging. Sometimes models suggested their own ideas, which produced a somewhat surrealistic effect (for example, "The Future Patron of Arts" -- a picture of man in a gas-mask holding a copy of Sovietskaya Kultura newspaper). The Swedish photography expert and director of Fotografiska Museet in Stockholm, Jan-Erik Lundstroem, called these pictures "kitchen surrealism".

The Persona non grata series was begun in the late '80s and now includes about two dozen portraits. But the project is not finished yet, which means new personages are constantly added to it.

 

Photographs from "Persona non grata" series are made on black-and-white photographic paper by traditional, so-called analog way without any computer manipulations. Every photographic picture from this series is unique and unrepeatable.

Gelatine siver prints, double-weight mat paper. Multi-staged hand tonning. Size of every picture is around 18x24 cm if not indicated otherwise.

Photographs from this series are in collections of The Royal Library in Copenhagen, in Photographic Museum Brandts Klaedefabrik in Odense (Denmark), in private collections in Finland, Denmark, Russia, Belarus, USA.

 

 

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