Group show with Oleg Dou, Marina Lapina, Sergey Maximishin, Evgeny Mokhorev, Evgeny Petruchansky, Margo Ovcharenko, Igor Savchenko and Dasha Yastrebova

« A portrait is not merely a resemblance. As soon as an emotion or a happening is translated into photography, it ceases to be a happening and becomes an opinion. Inaccuracy does not exist in photography. All photos are accurate. None of them show the truth.»  - Richard Avedon

An infinite game of reflections, like in a palace of mirrors: the objective and the model look at each other, the photographer looks at the model, the model looks at the audience, the audience observes the model and the photographer through the picture. Who is the master of this game? Who is the guide and who is the guided? With the photography exhibition “Regarde-moi dans les yeux” (or “Look me in the eyes”), the RTR gallery entices you to loose yourself into this enchanting game. This exhibition is an attempt to study the question of identity of Russian photography. Through the portraits of their comrades, the photographs exhibited here approach the issue of Russian photography like a magnifying glass, trying to answer tow crucial mirroring questions: “What is a Russian portrait?” and “What does Russian photography truly look like?”

The portrait is perhaps, the genre of photography where the photographer exposes himself the most, showing his most intimate sides. He tells us a story in the most condensed fashion possible. This is what Sergey Maximishin, Evgeny Mokhorev, and Igor Savchenko do with their established and distinctive styles, but also what younger artists such as Oleg DOU, Dasha Yastrebova, Marina Lapina, and Evgeny Peruchansky do in a no less convincing manner. These are all photographers who choose a preference for the portrait in order to convey their art, and in the case of Evgeny Mokhorev, Oleg DOU, Marina Lapina, and Margo Ovcherenko they choose the portrait as the solo genre of expressing themselves. By juxtaposing the images of Evgeny Mokhorev, who since 15 years shows us the children and adolescents of St.Petersburg, with those of Margo Ovcharenko or Dasha Yastrebova, we can start tracing back the evolution of the photographic perspective. Between classic, modern and contemporary, the Russian artists find each other, they express themselves, and they deliver us images, which are refined and have a very strong identity.