The Second Sun / Pinhole photography 

2020 — 2021

This project is a visual experiment, in which we wanted to show Petersburg through the eyes of people of the last century, those who died long ago. The city is shown from the perspective of futurists, cosmists, all kinds of avant-gardists. The flourishing of the city and its passion lies in the past, and now it exists rather as a powerful phantasm, consisting of ideas, expectations and hopes pinned on it before. On the one hand, they represent the core of culture, which creates the atmosphere and appearance of the city, on the other hand, the redundancy of the “dead” in the image of St. Petersburg (and maybe on its streets) does not allow the city to develop and move into the future now, contributing time and museification. Petersburg is the center of the futurism of the past, or, in other words, necrofuturism. 

To create the photographs, we used a pinhole — shooting with a lensless camera, which became famous at the same time as the Russian avant-garde. Pinhole photography establishes a different relationship with the visible and the hidden than ordinary human perception. Things, which seemed obvious become blurred and dissolve, the invisible appears and comes to the fore. The structure and movement of the rays of light is suddenly visible. The silhouettes of people, on the contrary, are erased and turn into shadows, as if fixing the very moment of disappearance. The exhibition is presented in the form of an imaginary photo diary consisting of a series of phantom moments — mutual transitions between the past and the future. We tried to show that the look from the point of view of the “dead” can be not so much gloomy as liberating, it is the opportunity to find yourself in a different course of time, to “disappear” for a while and see things in their original expression.

Authors: Shubina, Glinin