Alla Esipovich

Alla Esipovich is a photographer as well as a curator and collector. A common thread throughout all of her activities is a focus on humanism, on personal character as revealed in individual lives. Her photographs focus on people and their worlds, the interiors in which they exist, details of their wardrobes, and objects that, together, create a certain image which the artist often exaggerates.

Esipovich worked as a nurse in her youth, and that experience has informed her photographs. Illness often reveals people's vulnerability, defenselessness, and at times even strangeness, especially in the hospital space. But illness can also sharpen the desire to lead a fully valued life “like everyone else,” and this desire is reflected in her work.

Before Esipovich studied humanities at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Culture and Art, specializing in art expertise, she had spent more than ten years as a professional photographer. At the Institute, she studied photographic theory and practice. First, she completed a two-year course for reporters under the auspices of the Union of Journalists, advised by Pavel Markin, then she attended lectures in the history of photography by Vladimir Nikitin, associate professor at Saint Petersburg State University. When the State Center of Photography (ROSFOTO) opened its Baltic Photo School in 2002, focused on practical master classes and seminars led by photographers from around the world, Esipovich was among the first to enroll.

From 2000 to 2004, she headed the photo department at Sobaka.ru, a print and online magazine that has been the primary organ of the social and cultural life of Saint Petersburg for close to three decades. She led the “Portraits” program, not only as department head but as a working photographer. Even then, she had begun shooting on a Hasselblad camera, whose distinctive features include not just the high quality but also the square format of its photographs. While at Sobaka.ru, she created a section of the magazine containing portraits of Saint Petersburg residents who influenced the city’s cultural and business climate. Despite the journalistic feel of these shots, they also communicated the photographer’s anthropological and social interest in her subjects.

Esipovich has taken part in group exhibitions since 2002, and in 2004, she relaunched her career with the solo exhibition No Comment at the State Russian Museum. This black-and-white series kicked off perhaps the most recognizable period in her work and was the first in a set of photographic series with sharp thematic divisions.

The images of No Comment capture elderly people of various professions and social classes in their homes, which have practically become bodily extensions of them. They look directly into the camera, and their poses appear to be a game of their own design rather than a photographic conceit proposed by the artist, who seems to invite her subjects to share themselves with the viewer. The poses are often strange, and the subjects are mostly or totally nude, while the compressed spaces of their apartments overflow with things. This frank embodiedness—not sensual, not aestheticized, but showing aging and imperfect bodies—highlights the ethical conflict arising from the vulnerability of the aged. But the obvious comfort her subjects feel revealing themselves in their private spaces softens the shock felt by many viewers.

No Comment is divided into two “chapters,” and the main subject of the second of these is scholar of German philology Aleksey Ingelevich, his house, and his family (2003, ZAM, 2018.030.003, 2018.030.004). Ingelevich lives in a house, not an apartment, and its space extends to the street. These are perhaps the only of Esipovich’s works in which we see the horizon and the open air, in which we know the model’s name and profession; consequently, his story unfolds from a different perspective than those of her other subjects. The artist clearly sympathizes with her subject, who, despite a physical disability that Esipovich, as is her wont, presents in full bodily frankness, leads a full and vibrant life.

This series set the tone for Esipovich’s future work, defining a number of identifiable characteristics—both purely visual methods and conceptual features. In all her series, the artist maintains similar details: people looking directly into the camera, bright surroundings (sometimes garishly so, to the point of surrealism), and the square format mentioned above. In terms of content, she continues to focus on the human subject. In nearly all her series, the artist guides our attention to standard human problems: the inevitability of aging, unhappiness with one’s appearance, unequal marriages, childhood traumas, social standing, and so forth. We see these reflected even in their titles: Песочница [Sandbox] (2005), Счастье [Happiness] (2006), Звезда Эпизода [Star of the Scene] (2008),  Мужчины в моей жизни [Men in My Life] (2007), Бракосочетание [Marriage] (2009). But rather than presenting a social conflict deliberately or directly, it seems to hang in the air, the figures and objects configured in such a way that we grasp the burden of the problem even though we do not literally see it. Foregrounded is an interest in those who do not conform to standard ideas of beauty, success, or well-being, but who instead have a colorful individuality defined precisely by their departure from social stereotypes.

At end of the aughts, Esipovich received an invitation to assemble a collection of postwar porcelains for the LFZ (Leningradsky Farforovy Zavod, Leningrad Porcelain Factory, which in 2005 returned its original name, Imperatorsky [Imperial]). It is interesting to note that propagandistic porcelains have a peculiar social tone to them, since they were originally intended to explain the value of a new world to people. Having built up the collection, Esipovich then turned to painting, focusing on the artists of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s (1878–1939) circle. Once again, she was interested in the fates of these painters as individual humans; nearly all of their lives took unfortunate, and all too often tragic turns. This work resulted in The Circle of Petrov-Vodkin (2016), a large-scale exhibition at the State Russian Museum, and the publication of a catalogue. Meanwhile, as a curator, Esipovich has shifted her attention to Soviet sculpture, organizing the exhibition 17/37. Soviet sculpture. The Ascent (2023) at the New Manege in Moscow.

Esipovich continues to live and work in Saint Petersburg, remaining among those who influence the cultural life of that city.

Maria Saltanova

Translated by Ian Dreiblatt