Photographer V. Vyatkin: «One does not go to war as if it was an excursion»
The profession did not make me a happy person…
09.09.2014 “Moskovskij Komsomolets”
A famous photographer Vladimir Vyatkin, winner of the most prestigious professional awards, lives in a one-room rented apartment, that looks like a warehouse. It is filled with books, albums, littered with things. Recently, when an ambulance came here, the bookshelf broke and injured both the doctor and the patient. Another ambulance team had to come. This is not a joke.
However, the boat of his life, bumping into reefs and sinking to the bottom, always keeps its course towards some new islands that are not yet discovered by anyone but him.
– Several days ago, your colleague, war photographer working for “Rossiya Segodnya” news agency, Andrey Stenin was buried. You saw war many times through the lens of a camera and risked your life as well…
– One does not go to war as if it was an excursion. In order to become invisible for them {for the military, editor's note}, not to be a stranger anymore, one has to live there for weeks. Andrey was shooting war in Ukraine for almost 4 months. I suppose, he lost the sense of fear. And when he stopped getting in touch, I had the worst apprehensions. Unfortunately, they were confirmed.
It is hard to be Stirlitz in your own family
– I can live in a dugout, in a trench, anywhere, but I have never had more or less normal conditions, like a friend of mine who has an apartment of several hundred square meters. All ceilings, floor made of glass. I told her: "Look, let me live in your kitchen, and I will take awesome pictures of Moscow." It didn’t work out. I have no cottage, no house in the countryside. I never made a lot of money.
– You have 5 kids instead!
– Thanks God, my kids do not bother me too often. They don’t call, don’t come to visit me. It is my fault: I didn’t give them enough love, enough affection, care, attention. The only good thing I did to them – I was able to bring them all together, to unite them. They are in touch with each other.
– I wonder what is the role of women in a life of a photographer Vyatkin?
– They are “located” between flowers and war. Once Woody Allen was asked: “What cinema means for you?”. He replied that cinema is a relationship between man and woman. And the deeper and more dramatic this relationship is, the deeper and more dramatic would be a movie. And the most important thing about this relationship is to keep your own freedom. I know the cost of freedom. I am relatively single since 2006. Luckily, I did not ruin the life of young, pretty, kind and sometimes intelligent girls. Many people took care of me and helped a lot, there is a person who saved my life twice.
– Were all these women your muses?
– No, not all of them. I am terrified when thinking what would happen in case I had something with those muses. There was a movie series where a girl asked one of the characters if he was ready to run after her. He answered: “I am ready to run after many which doesn’t mean I am ready to give my life for them”. I was wise enough to be able to give a goodbye to some people despite tears in my eyes. I was able to say: “I won’t bring happiness to you”. It’s not enough to feel that you have a faithful dog, it is important to love. And without mutual love the relationship becomes a nightmare. I want not to feel sorry I want to love. It is hard to be Stirlitz in your own family.
I have achieved something in photography, I succeeded in something, I live within photography but my profession did not make me a happy person. It is impossible to divide yourself between profession and private life. Photography is a lifestyle for me. Unfortunately, it is not always compatible with a lifestyle of a normal person.
– Then it is better to give no hope to a woman so that she won’t become unhappy.
–Yes. Many people blame me: why did you attract her? To squeeze myself out. When I am in a state of euphoria while in a relationship, I take pictures in a special way. And when everything breaks down and it seems that tomorrow will never come, – the photographs turn out to be completely different. Photography has a magnificent cryptographic mechanism, an accurate litmus test akin to music.
— How long did your longest marriage last?
– I had two marriages, each time for 14 years, to the day. My kids noticed it. And the third marriage lasted for exactly half of it: 7 years, again to the day. It’s a kind of mysticism. My marriage with the mother of my youngest kids was civil. I suppose that a woman is waiting for a real marriage, it is important for her that the relationship becomes legally formalized. She warned me three times: “Vyatkin, you are losing both myself and the kids. When you leave – I’m in tears, when you come back – I’m in tears again. I cannot play (she is an actress), cannot go on the stage, cannot act in movies. You create astonishing discomfort”. And when I came back from Chechnya in 2006 the apartment was empty. Twice in my life I was close to commit a crime. The first time I was stopped by fear, the second – I’m not one of those who can {shoot, editor's note} in the back. Then it became clear to me that the energy of hatred is fruitless, and the energy of forgiveness, expressed through love, gives other possibilities.
Orders on the back of the head
– Journalists like to remember their own and others' gaffes.
– There was a story that seems ridiculous today. I was working as a young photographer in the APN (Novosti Press Agency, now “Rossiya Segodnya” news agency), when it was needed to take a portrait of the then Prime Minister, Nikolai Tikhonov. At that time, in the homeland of twice Heroes of Social Labor and the Soviet Union, a sculpture had to be established during their lifetime. Tikhonov was a very busy man, and so, in order to save his time and avoid posing for the sculptor, we were assigned to take his pictures full face and in profile. Two respectable photographers were appointed, and they took me as an assistant, since I was a student of the legendary Vasily Malyshev and knew how to set up the light. I also brought my camera, but one of my colleagues treated me like an unskilled worker: “Recharge it!” I mistakenly took the film and inserted it into my camera. Moreover, this film turned out to be the main one. When we developed it, there was a shock: orders and medals hung on the back of Tikhonov’s neck, stars shone in his eyes, etc. As a result, they blamed me for everything. In the Stalin era, they would have shot me down. Even in my time, one could expect to be sent to Kolyma, and the other one – to Vorkuta. I was saved by my colleague Sergey Subbotin, who masterfully owned a scalpel, pencil, brush. We printed all the photographs, cut out the “chandelier” with a razor. In 4 days, together with a retoucher we prepared everything. In fact, we turned photographic images into graphic ones. The pictures were sent to the Central Committee, everyone was thanked. Except me.
– In Soviet times, the photographic censorship was a usual phenomenon?
– Of course. Even I had to reject photographs while being responsible for creating a collection of Soviet photographic works for the most prestigious international competition of photojournalists World Press Photo (WPP). I did this job for 12 years. Every application had to be reviewed by the Union of Journalists. We were sitting together with a censor, watching the pictures and he would put aside every image that discredited the Soviet government, including pornography. The selection was very strict, and it was impossible to imagine a photograph of Brezhnev picking his nose. The most unique person in our country was Sergey Vasiliev from Chelyabinsk, who received four “Golden Eye” prizes, in fact, without leaving his home. If his pictures went officially, they would not even be sent to the competition. I recently asked him how he managed to send photos and avoid censorship. He said: "Very simple, I sent them quietly via train." At that moment, the Soviet Union and China were closed to the West, and any pictures from behind the curtain aroused keen interest.
– Are photographers envious people?
– Very much. Also, musicians and artists are. Without exceptions. I have one “Golden Eye” but my uniqueness is that I received 7 prizes in different thematic categories. For two wars: in Afghanistan and in Chechnya, for art, for ballet, medicine, everyday life and for sports. This is the whole spectrum of life. And someone shoots only war, someone - only sports, someone - only theater.
Often, we do not depend on ourselves. At some point, we received a lot of prizes, but none of us was ever recognized as the best photographer of the year. And it is still unlikely, for political reasons. Everything is interconnected.
– Well, indeed, WPP is one of the most ambitious world photography competitions. What if Vladimir Vyatkin receives the coveted statuette?
— It is theoretically unlikely that I would become the best photographer of the year at WPP. But there is one possibility. Let’s imagine, yesterday I took the pictures of the landing of aliens from space in my courtyard. And it doesn’t matter if the photos were sharp enough. I will be the best, and the whole world will see my pictures. Another possibility. If yesterday 2 photographers – Vladimir Vyatkin and Dmitry Azarov – captured the landing of the aliens, at least you can determine whose shots were sharper. But if the same event was shot by 100 photographers? Who will be the best? Not the one who shoots better, but the one who has a different level of administrative resource.
"Russian reporter" magazine with a circulation of less than 200 thousand copies is a regional scale! The global guarantee of a powerful thematic publication is “Stern”, “Paris Match”, “Newsweek”, “Time” with millions of copies! Your name will be known everywhere within a week (if your work is published there). Therefore, it makes no sense to ride a bicycle and try to chase on someone who rides a “Ferrari” with 30 people pushing him from behind and five more pulling him on a rope. He will be the best, because he has 5-6 covers a year in globally recognized medias, he is known in person.
– What prevents you from driving a “Ferrari”?
– If I spoke English I wouldn’t be sitting here now. We had no motivation to learn foreign languages, we lived in a confined space. The moment came when the largest media realized: what is the point of sending a journalist, translator, photographer and manager on a business trip, when you can send only one person who will do everything himself? My weak points are that I don’t speak English and don’t know how to use the computer. I don’t use Photoshop in my work, my pictures are based on my artistic and graphic skills. My goal is to make music sound in my photographs. If I take one good photo in a year, it means this year was not lived in vain.
–You like to make photo series. They are like novels in images: one has to watch instead of reading…
– Once I had a German graduate student, she was working on her dissertation. She was the daughter of a former Soviet officer and a German woman, she was fluent in both languages. Once she called me: “Vladimir Yurievich, I was assigned to write an art history article and was asked to add a piquant detail. You work on your series for a very long time: a year, five, and even forty. My question is: what does photographer Vladimir Vyatkin feel like after completing a 20-year series?”. I answered: “I feel the sheer calm of satisfied ambitions of male physiology”. Two weeks later the magazine comes out. The material is highly rated, but the editor slightly changed my phrase. It turned out like this: “Photographer Vladimir Vyatkin, who has been shooting his series for a very long time, having finished his next job, feels tired as from hard physical labor.” What a prose! I was disappointed...