The Enigma Of Time.

Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko was born on Vassilievsky Island in Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) in 1962. He began taking pictures in 1971, at the age of nine, and graduated from the Leningrad Public University of Society-related Professions in 1978 with a degree in Photojournalism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 he produced several series of photographs about the human condition of the Russian people during this time and the suffering they endured throughout the twentieth century.

“To illustrate links between the present and the past, he created powerful metaphors by introducing long exposure and intentional camera movement into street photography.”

His most well known series of this period is “City of Shadows”.

Titarenko’s prints are created in the darkroom. Bleaching and toning add depth to his nuanced palette of grays, rendering each print a unique interpretation of his experience and imbuing his work with a personal and emotive visual character.

A lot of his images are quite cinematic and not quite “black and white”, with vague colours in some of his images. The sense of composition is important to detail what the viewer is looking at, the majority of the time his images involve a lot of long exposures of people, which creates a soft effect on each person.