The online platform TEO by Cosmoscow presents the TEO Section stand, which will display photographs by Soviet, Russian, and foreign artists.
From a physical point of view, photography is the result of capturing light on light-sensitive material: when the camera shutter opens, it creates the sensation of time standing still, capturing subjective reality.
The concept of the photo lab booth is based on Michelangelo Antonioni's cult film Blow-Up (1966) and reflections on “truth” in the frame. Antonioni, who constructed his own story based on the short story “The Devil's Drool” (1959) by writer Julio Cortázar, who, in turn, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954), used the metaphor of “photo enlargement” as a technique for deconstructing reality. The director invites the viewer to follow the quest and conclusions of the film's protagonist, Thomas, a successful photographer who captures a random scene in a park and then, as he enlarges the photograph, increasingly loses touch with what he has seen. With each subsequent enlargement, the details gradually turn into noise, and reality falls apart. In Cortázar's story, the protagonist looks at the image and realizes that reality has already become hostage to the lens: “The picture was taken at the right moment, because I still had time to realize that they both guessed what was going on, that they were looking at me—the boy anxiously and questioningly, and the woman irritably, hostile, which was evident in her whole body and face, which had been shamelessly stolen and became eternal prisoners of ordinary photographic film.” . Thus elevated to the absolute “truth,” the frame no longer serves as objective evidence and becomes a reflection of a personal view, but not of fact.
Susan Sontag also notes this characteristic in her seminal collection of essays, On Photography (1977): "In deciding how a photograph should look, in preferring one option over another, photographers always impose their criteria on the subject. Although in a certain sense the camera does capture rather than simply interpret reality, photography is just as much an interpretation of the world as painting and drawing."
The TEO Section stand features works by authors from different decades, genres, and techniques: from the classics of Soviet reportage photography Alexander Abaza, Viktor Akhlomov, Dmitry Balterman, and contemporary artists Asya Gorbacheva, Andrey Minakov, and Zhenya Mironov, to renowned foreign masters Rebecca Norris Webb and Jean-Christophe Couet. The semantic dominant of the exhibition will be a photograph by Vasily Maximov with a peculiar “veil” of paper covering part of a female portrait. When it was exhibited at one of the exhibitions of the legendary Moscow photo club Novator, guests tried in every way to uncover it, so great was their desire to get to the real image hidden behind the paper layer. This gesture by the viewers became a symbolic act, a desire to penetrate beyond the boundaries of the visible and get to the truth. The work itself demonstrates the impossibility of such an endeavor—any image, when taken out of context, always remains only a fragment.
The concept for the stand was developed by Designic, a public space design studio with extensive experience in creating interiors where art plays a special role. The stand was created in collaboration with Solo Office Interiors and SK Textile. The works were provided by the Glaz Gallery, headed by Maria Burasovskaya.
