Here he is, Victor Ershov.
This man is the seam
between Soviet and post-Soviet photos.
He became post-Soviet, rose to his post,
and left for the cemetery,
but stayed with us as a seam
and a bridge.
Victor Ershov joined the Soviet Union magazine in the mid-60s. He was a very lively and restless young man, obsessed with photography. Another distinguishing feature was that he loved to show his new ‘snapshots’ to everyone in the editorial office, to discuss them and hear people’s opinions. (Just as poets like to read their verses, since having an audience is an insatiable need as far as they are concerned.) But most importantly, he showed us what he had seen himself and printed himself, not shots commissioned by the editors. And that was always interesting because they were not the images that got printed. This was what existed in real life. Victor never passed by, he took those shots, probably knowing they would never be accepted for print. And he did this in a photographically precise and expressive manner.
There were several such people in my circle, and their names are now well-known: Alexander Lapin, Alexander Slyusarev, Boris Mikhailov, Vladimir Syomin, Lyalya Kuznetsova… They ‘saw differently’ – this phrase stuck, coined by the Finnish publishers who produced an album of works by several unofficial photographers from the USSR in the late 1980s. But Ershov never became famous. He was, as they say, not short of attention from colleagues interested in his work, but he never lived to see the time ‘when the tastes of critics and lovers of photography crystallised and a new photographic Olympus arose’, composed of élite and ‘well-established photographers’, including those who were formerly persecuted and rejected, before gaining official acceptance. Victor Ershov never joined this select cohort, remaining half-forgotten and rarely mentioned in materials on the history of Soviet and Russian photography.
Today we can fill this gap and give Victor Ershov his due, as a photographer with perspicacious vision, a firm and lively conviction that we should not photograph the ‘street of dreams’ conceived by some editor-in-chief but what we see ourselves, in the way we see it. This exhibition was made possible by the concern shown for her elder brother Victor by his sister Galina Ershova, who preserved and donated his archive to the Moscow House of Photography Museum.
