Capturing time with Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko is a St Petersburg- based photographer, currently exhibiting around Europe, America and Russia. His photographs are beautifully eerie depictions of his city and its people in an enchanting atmosphere. The most intriguing feature of his photography, though, is time.

Titarenko presents time not as a single moment, but as an extended elapse captured in its entirety. The photographer uses a long exposure to photograph a movement that takes a few seconds, like the arrival and departure of a tram. Every movement of this tram is present on one exposure, in one photograph, so it appears as an indefinite yet recognisable blur, like a shadow. This theme of capturing time is the principle idea behind Titarenko’s series Time Standing Still.

His technique opens up the possibility of narrative within a photograph: a tram arrives, waits and departs, whilst a man stands by without moving. This story can be seen in full in the photograph. This is unusual in photography: narrative is more commonly implied in the image and deduced by the viewer. Indeed, Titarenko talks in interviews about his use of the stillness of time technique to tell small stories of life in his city. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, social and economic problems were rife and people were rendered ‘wandering shadows’, he says. During this time, Titarenko took a series of photographs, many of them narrative, called City of Shadows.

One particular photograph is of a crowd of people ascending stairs. The crowd is blurred into a ghostly grey mass. The people wander together, but are visible only as shadows, not individually identifiable. Similarly, the man who appears to be waiting for the tram does not board. He seems at a loss, neither waiting nor going, simply standing. He is a man without purpose; a wandering shadow. His inaction is revealed by the movement of the tram, his missed opportunity.

Meaning and metaphor aside, Titarenko’s technique allows life to be photographed as it is lived and the world to be photographed as it is experienced. The irony is that the images created appear entirely alien, like nothing we ever see. It is this ephemeral, yet somehow realist effect that gives a haunting beauty to Titarenko’s presentations of Russian life.