Seasons. My Friends. 2000-2004

Valery Katsuba, Yury Vinogradov, Eugeny Sorokin

Several observations, then thought over, became an inspiration for the project «Seasons. My friends», and happy relationship helped to make this project.

On the eve of the year 2000, while working in the archives, I occasionally was carried away by the photographs of 1900’s: parties in private houses, groups of friends in the country, in sport clubs, on the skating-rink, on the yachts... Standing still in front of the camera, they look into eternity, and they want to be remembered the way they look right now. They perceived photographer as a painter, who is drawing their portrait, and they were hiding the secrecy, that they had in their nature. They looked with a hope into coming 20th century and didn’t know, what it will bring to their lives. They looked into the time that I know about. Ladies, endlessly long time waiting in beautiful poses, are sitting on the grass in their best and appropriate dresses in Pavlovsky park, the young man is keeping the carriage in front of the camera in 1913 on the skating-rink by the Jusupovsky palace. I like, that I don’t know him and that I know what happened in the world a year after it... Then I went further to 20’s, 40’s, 60’s... and to our time.

One day, waiting for the editor of one of Moscow magazines, I was senselessly looking thorough the torn out from his magazine and hang on the walls portraits: color and black-and-white side-views of the people that I also don’t know at all. I began to compare the eyebrows, eyelashes, lips of the editor’s favorites. I was looking for the resemblances and differences. And more I was carried away with this search, more I liked those portraits, but not because of the form of the eyebrows or fullness of the lips of those young people. I wanted to understand the reason of their attractiveness. And I stopped this occupation only when I realized that I mustn’t do this. That every person carries in himself his own destination, unknown, first of all, for himself. Inevitability, even happy one, to be right now with me, with us, and inevitability to leave then. We all, turning around to each other, independently try to find out why we are needed here. We are there to value, sympathize and love another world, which is grateful and is ready to give us in return the cheer and happiness it has. And it is mysterious, but it has inexplicable sense and beauty in it. And the gratitude of the photographer first of all for the allowance to photograph a person and it’s uniqueness. And talent is the possibility to receive this allowance. Then... it was a Sunday dinner at home. I was watching my friends. I examined their faces, just like the portraits on the walls of the Moscow editor’s office, guessing the exclusiveness of every one of them. And again different eyebrows, lips, eyelashes... I know, that my friends are beautiful. But, examining attentively individual features, it’s not always evident, which one is beautiful. I waited, until on the faces of my friends reflected their wonderful essence and tried to remember how it looked.

Then I was watching the gestures, glances, emotions — details, in one word — and in some moments my friends reminded me of those, who were in 1900’s, in 20’s...

In human nature and predictions there is something invariable, invariable in something that causes joy to your eyes and to your imagination. And inspired shapes, no matter how old they are, from time to time appear again. They remain in our memory and we, when we need it, brighten them up, uniting époques and generations, and this saves us in anxious conditions and lets us fall asleep.

And the last... Then love was given to me, but I couldn’t save it. And this is my sorrow. And joy is that there was happiness, which we eagerly shared with friends. And in return we received the same. There was dacha, picnics, autumn, winter, summer, parties, spring. And I thought: here is me, my love, my friends on Russian land, in Pavlovsky park, by the Jusupovsky palace, at the dacha, on the skating-rink. My friends are dressed in their best and appropriate right now and here dresses and in front of us there’s time that they don’t know and neither do I.

With gratitude to those, who was by my side: Jury Vinogradov, Nil Kirk, Vladislav Mamishev-Monroe, Evgeniy Sorokin and to my other friends.