YALTA BEACH PORTRAITS

2002

Archival pigment prints on Arches paper, 50x60 cm.
Edition of 3+1

This series is sort of an experiment, an innocent photographic joke. You spend three days in Yalta, in the crowd of Russian and Ukrainian holiday-makers on the beach which has been the symbol of the Russian idea for a seaside holiday in over a century. You take a set of simple, traditional photographic elements – a flash, a pink inflatable safety belt, a straight-to-camera pose – and apply them on the people you meet. You reduce the additional detail to the minimum – nothing but the sea, the sky, a bathing suite, sometimes a cap or a book – and wait to see what kind of group identity might probably come out of the pictures. The results are stunning – the people are so undoubtedly Russian, with their common history and personal social status emerging from the gestures, the poses, the looks…