Ivan and the Moon
DESCRIPTION AND SCOPE: Ivan is the elder, he is 16. Andrey, nicknamed Moon, is the younger, 14 by now. The two brothers live in a distant village in the northern part of Russia. They are not like city teenagers, with completely different moral values and a fairy tale world inside: they go hunting and fishing, can use a joiner’s chisel, play with ghosts at abandoned places, do not want to move to a city, love nature. Mature and childish. Naive and enigmatic. In this ongoing project I want to show the mysteriousness of these brothers’ world.
The narrative in ‘Ivan and the Moon’ will be neither chronological nor event related. It will not have a strict and one-way-to-read plot. All the images will be connected among each other on the level of correlated motives and on the level of hypothetical story interpretations. Anyway, each picture is supposed to provoke some inquiry and a question ‘What is going on?’ It will be also important to show that the world around the boys is itself magical and their games and fantasies are consequences of being a part of this world.
My aim for this project is to follow the brothers through their life (I met them at a folklore expedition and on the third year of visiting the village I started to make pictures) and ‘document’ things that are impossible to document. World of boy’s fantasies, ghosts, gods, spirits of specific places, magic itself. Such things usually can not be literally depicted . As J.Szarkowski stated in his famous work ‘Mirrors and Windows’: ‘most issues of importance cannot be photographed’. My goal is to try to photograph the ‘unphotographable’ side of the matter and challenge some formal criteria of ‘classical’ documentary.
SIGNIFICANCE: First of all, the time factor. The project will be lasting as long as possible – hopefully, through all my life. Such a deep immersion will result in a multilayered work that will fix gradual changes and small details in brothers’ lives and in the world that surrounds them. Secondly, it will be one of a few long-termed projects made in Russia by a Russian photographer. While there are some projects on Russia made by foreign artists, Russian photography market is absent, no photo education in universities is available, almost no galleries exist, to publish a photobook is impossible. It all ends in creating small, thematically and aesthetically mostly news-oriented stories. That is why it is crucial to work on some deep and focused story in order to show another, insider’s perspective on the local culture.
ARTISTIC MERIT: In the project I want to experiment with narration system in photography, create unexpected connections and through this work on the border of documentary and art photography challenging both genres.
http://www.burnmagazine.org/epf-2011-finalists/2011/05/daria-tuminas-ivan-and-the-moon/
