Alexey (Aleksey, Alexis, Alexei) Viktorovich Titarenko (born November 25, 1962; ) is a Soviet Union-born American photographer and artist. He lives and works in New York City.
Biography
Titarenko was born in Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia. His mother survived the Siege of Leningrad and later became a mathematician. His father was born at the Gulag camp Karlag in Kazakhstan, near Karaganda where his parents were deported to by bolsheviks from Ukraine during collectivization. He later became a coal mining engineer in his home town Karaganda, Kazakhstan. They met each other as students of Leningrad University. At age 15, Alexey Titarenko became the youngest member of the independent photo club Zerkalo (Mirror). He went on to graduate with honors from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad's Institute of Culture.
Influenced by the Russian avant-garde works of Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and the Dada art movement (from the early 20th century), his series of collages and photomontages, created by superposing several negatives, Nomenklatura of Signs (first exhibited in 1988, in Leningrad, and later same year, in Drouart gallery, Paris, France) is a commentary on the Communist regime as an oppressive system that converts citizens into mere signs. In 1989, Nomenklatura of Signs was included in Photostroika, a major show of new Soviet photography that toured the US.
During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991–1992, he produced several series of photographs about the human condition of ordinary people living on its territory and the suffering they endured then and throughout the twentieth century. To illustrate links between the present and the past, he created metaphors by introducing long exposure and intentional camera movement into street photography. Sources have noted that his most important innovation is the way he uses long exposure. John Bailey, in his essay about Garry Winogrand and Titarenko, mentioned that one of the obstacles that he surmounted successfully was being too visible himself and, as a consequence, people's possible reaction to his presence altering the authenticity of the image.
Titarenko's best-known series from this period is City of Shadows (which is also a title of his autobiographical novel), whose urban landscapes reiterate the Odesa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin Stairs) scene from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin. Inspired by the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Titarenko also translated Dostoevsky's vision of the Russian soul into sometimes poetic, sometimes dramatic pictures of his native city, Saint Petersburg. Intitled "Les Quatres Mouvements de Saint Petersbourg" by French art historian, writer and curator Gabriel Bauret, these photographs were exhibited, as Titarenko's solo show curated by Gabriel Bauret, at the Rencontres d'Arles 2002 in Reattu Museum (Arles, France).
Along with Alexander Sokurov's 2002 film Russian Ark, the City of Shadows exhibition (which now included photographs from the mid and late 1990s inspired by Dostoevsky's novels) was a part of the program celebrating the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg at the 2003 Clifford Symposium, in Middlebury, VT: What Became of Peter's Dream? Petersburg in History and Arts The Russian Ark and the City of Shadows have one similarity: both are based on the experimental innovation: Alexander Sokurov using a single, very long – 96 minutes sequence shot and Titarenko's several minutes long exposure for some of his photographs.
In his photographs from Venice, mostly taken between 2001 and 2008, Titarenko uses "... a highly stylized technic that he put deftly in a service of strongly determined vision." Moreover, "Venice also offers him a reminiscence of Saint Petersburg, similar to a recollection found in the work of Marcel Proust, who, in Albertine disparue (The Fugitive), recounts during his Venetian sojourn that he cannot resist comparisons to Combray." Venice, Italy creates a counterbalance, a point of comparison with Venice of the North where he was born - Saint Petersburg. In Titarenko's photographs, like in Proust's writings, " ... what matters is less the scrupulous description of reality than a particular vision it renders."