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By
Andrew Jack
MOSCOW, 2 May 2000—
Looking at the photographer Anthony Suau’s Beyond
The Fall perspective is a striking way to re-live the momentous
decade of the 1990s, which was arguably the most important ten years of
the twentieth century.
While the period that most caught the headlines and
popular imagination was concentrated around one place at one time—Berlin in 1989—
just as important is the transition
that followed the swift collapse of Communism. Not to mention the
different forms that it took across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union.
Such a subtle and continuing
process does not easily lend itself to words, let alone to images. But the
1990s was a highly visual decade, and the events taking place in the
region—with their shift towards a
generally less totalitarian form of control—
made it
far simpler to capture the events on film than in the past.
Suau
begins in Berlin, but his selection in this retrospective exhibition
focuses largely on areas further east, and in times more recent;
including some of the more newsworthy subsequent events, but also far
more subtle and less immediately photogenic studies of aspects of
everyday life.
There is a certain nostalgia and timelessness in some
of the images, most notably in Romania, with which he seems to share a
strong affinity. The tender pictures of rural life—a fairground; people working in the fields;
children playing games; and above all a cyclist dozing on verge of a
road—
could almost have
been the work of Robert Doisneau in France many years before.
There
are some striking pictures of the old and the new, with a cash dispenser
crudely slapped into a grey wall in place of one of four uniform display
cases carrying bureaucratic notices and extracts from newspapers.
He portrays the gradually building tensions in the
early 1990s, and the parallels in the ethnic tensions unleashed by the
collapse of Communism, in Bosnia, but also in lesser-known Abkhazia in
Georgia. His images of a war-torn Grozny—in fact taken five years ago during the
first contemporary Chechen war—are a
reminder of how such conflicts continue to fester and explode today.
Anthony Suau: Sukhumi, Abkhazia 1993: Executed Georgian
soldiers
© Anthony Suau
Photo courtesy of Manezh Exhibition Centre,
Moscow
Arguably the most
haunting and depressing images are those of Russia, however. Almost all
are in black and white, which helps to accentuate the gloom and tensions
of the country today. A rare, ironic, exception, portrays in full colour
the two miserable and lonely shirts that hang in an otherwise empty
department store in central Moscow in 1992.
There are the
political events that shaped the time, often taken from unusual angles,
such as the curious four members of staff watching mass pro-Boris
Yeltsin demonstrations on Red Square in 1993 from a bedroom in the
Rossiya Hotel; or the confusion of spontaneous protest among the
anti-Yeltsin forces at the same time.
But even
the scenes of everyday life have a harshness about them. There is the
nonchalant shot of a corpse, victim of part of the daily currency of
contact killings. And two pictures showing the similar indifference to the
living, with two pensioners in their spartan surroundings.
Anthony Suau: Pensioner, Moscow, Russia 1994
© Anthony
Suau
Photo courtesy of Manezh Exhibition Centre, Moscow
There is the
bleak industrial brutality so often repeated across the country, and
well highlighted in a simple shot of endless identical apartment
balconies; or an image of three children playing across the depressing
backdrop of pipelines and machinery in the northern town of Norilsk.
The extremes of contemporary Russian society are
well, if somewhat crudely, reflected in a picture of Tverskaya Street in
Moscow in 1994, portraying a slumped drunk, a man hurrying on his way
juxtaposed against a reflection of an advertisement for "West" cigarettes,
with a Western smoking and dreaming of a beach holiday.
Anthony Suau: Moscow, Russia 1994
© Anthony Suau
Photo
courtesy of Manezh Exhibition Centre, Moscow
Even the scenes that ought
to be more up-lifting—of a fashion
show, of well-dressed nouveaux riches in a nightclub, or of dinner in a
well-known "approved" artist’s luxurious apartment— somehow only resonate a superficiality and
excess which is part of the extremes of Russia today.
Anthony Suau: Nightclub, Moscow, Russia 1994
©
Anthony Suau
Photo courtesy of Manezh Exhibition Centre, Moscow
Unintrusively, the organisers have added a series of
texts which combine three different perspectives on the period
effectively: that of Suau himself; the academic Jacques Rupnik; and the
writer Tatiana Tolstaya, who powerfully describes the contrast between the
desperation of the early 1990s among some of her acquaintances, and the
equally uneasy—and short-lived —
decadance
that followed.
Beyond The Fall
Manezh
Exhibition Centre, Moscow
After Moscow, Anthony
Suau: Beyond The Fall will
travel to the following venues:
Bilbao, Spain: Fundacion BBK
4 October - 26
November 2000
Lisbon, Portugal: Centro Cultural de
Belem
5 April - June 17 2001
Novorossiisk, Russia: State Historical Museum
4
October - 21 October 2001
Stavropol, Russia: State Local-History Museum
4
November - 2 December 2001
St. Petersburg, Russia: Russian Museum-Marble
Palace
8 February - 21 March 2002
Anthony Suau Web Site
Andrew Jack is a British journalist based
in Moscow and the author of The French Exception (Profile Books,
London). He is also a member of the editorial board of Culturekiosque.com.
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Art and Archaeology Exhibitions