Alexander Mendelevich

Aesthetic practice of mundane

The key word for my photographer’s activity and inspiration is wonderment, a feeling of the world full with absurd, meanings and contradictions, happiness and pain. Everything is real and artificial at the same time. I wonder from simple things that can be noticed in everyday routine life; that we get up for work, come back home, look into the eyes of someone unknown, smell, touch things, have memories and moods, move our lips and words come out and much more. I put the occurring in ambivalent space– the place where emotions, pain, vulnerability and experience are naked, where situations are somewhat absurd, associative, where they echo childhood, and question female and male nature. A play, implying the contact with objects, functions as a search, a test and discovery of various thresholds of the sensuous and an exploration of relations with one’s self and the environment. We are surrounded by huge number of diverse visual information wherein takes place some routine beatification and imitation of aesthetic practice of the past. Our sensitivity to see pain and suffering nearby is dulled, they are almost invisible to be easily catched. For me photography is facing a deficit of ordinary mundane diversity. I look for a new shape to build communication and to talk, because photography keeps changing and constantly crosses a new pain threshold, since the world changes. I increasingly inclined to think that in photography the only document that can enclose to feeling of genuine it is a pain that comes to being through pallete of emotions and some conflict in frame. And feels like this document tends to be free from distinct boundaries of “here” and “now”. People here are in their rented apartments, kind of inconspicuous survivors of today Western society, torn apart by typical daily existence, where they are between livelihood and studies, banks and dreams, trends, news and conflicts, and so on. Here, distortion is used as a trauma, a pain that in still imagery becomes an open wound. The uncomfortable situation and the position of the body takes away the secure, certainty sense of things, makes them more vulnerable and allows them to open up. Often a human body is regarded as kind of unwritten taboo, a point where cultural and social layers cross under the cover of some mood of erotic romantics and stereotyped conception of femininity and masculinity. It seems that all our feelings are being repressed into one superficial façade that allows only one type of beauty to imply on perfection. My wish is to create another model that polar to the notions of popular modern beauty and create a space where imperfection is in fact perfection An important purpose in my works is documentation of human condition through intensifying moments we don’t pay much attention and compressing some vital concentrate into single everyday situation. I apply the strengths of photography medium to explore the limits of normal and its nuances, to challenge beauty concepts and existing clichés. And it’s amazing that photography has a stunning paradox to combine documentary and experimentation and still to keep the evidential power of the image. Another important element for me is that people seem to be going about their daily affairs. It does not require an especially significant event to transform life into something extremely bizarre - just a minor change is sufficient. It is as if it captures an extraordinary and surrealistic moment hiding just below the surface of normal daily life.

Photographer

I was born the Northern Caucasus region of Russia in 1979. From the first meeting with the world of photography, I felt that the reality and the image in the photograph are very similar and at the same time different. Photography immediately fascinated me, with its process and result. It was interesting to look through the viewfinder, the world seemed like mine. Since 2000 year I live in Israel and while studying in Jerusalem at the academy of art and design Bezalel I made sure of that photography has long been more than just 'catching the moment' and requires intense intervention from the photographer. One of the interesting things I learned in academy is the understanding that, with time, photography changes, that the view towards photography as a media and as a document changes, as well as its value.
Staged photography allows me more control to make the occurrence sharper, to create a reality, where you can feel every detail. For me, to make photography is to look for an existence, a story in everything, to transform moments that I see, think, feel and dream into a visual representation. Maybe photography in my life it’s kind of a way to cope with the world and tool to research it; an attempt to create a dialog with it, to organize and explain the world. And what do we have - just a rectangle in which we keep reassembling the world. It’s a fantastic tool: an objective picture in subjective viewfinder.

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