Tim Parchikov was born in 1983 in Moscow. This exhibition, the result of Tim Parchikov‘s visual exploration as photographer and filmmaker, brings together work created in European and Russian cities over the last four years.
In cinema suspense denotes unresolved conflict, an undecided outcome, the accumulation of vague and inexplicable anxiety. This device arose in the years after the last war, almost immediately acquiring a new interpretation in the second wave of European existentialism and ideally defining the uncontrollable melancholy that descended on the post-war world. But as distinct from cinematography, where apprehension grips the audience in precise doses and at the director’s bidding, in real life involuntary trepidation proved to be irrepressible and overwhelming. In modern times this primordial human trait is intensified and nurtured by mass media essentially fixated on catastrophe. Information services have globalised the space we inhabit and erased internal boundaries, but with an ultimately alienating effect: our unease has become isolation and vulnerability of the individual when faced by the unknown.
The photographer is obliged to traverse space – visually, not physically – and in this sense, as a traveller, he is more unprotected than the rest of us. An equally unpredictable feeling of suspense may overtake him on a deserted embankment in Istanbul, or in the middle of a crowded square in Rome or Naples. Photography becomes a shield that protects him from stupefaction and reconciles him with uncertainty. Parchikov tries to record the confusion that occurs as our delicate inner equilibrium teeters on the brink of collapse. The photographer’s personal aesthetic experience exposes the nervous turmoil of the situation, documents its unresolved state.
Parchikov’s ‘Suspense’ project is the visual manifesto of the new ‘lost’ generation of young people who at the turn of the century acquired complete freedom of information and movement as well as the illusion of all-pervasive communication, yet forfeited an integrated system of value judgement and were unexpectedly confronted by complete isolation. Their lives turned into a lonely journey in search of lost self-identification. Any halting point and encounter with reality during this journey became a form of suspense.
Parchikov often conveys anxiety by the twilight dramaturgy of acid-coloured lighting in which invisible, indiscernible or off-frame factors are as important as the content of the shot. His ability to counterbalance the static and dynamic in photography is based on a superb understanding of cinematography. He produces an exquisite play of colour, nuances of shadow and contrast, striving to approach the visual prototype of his quest – the ‘film noir’ of the Forties and ‘neo-noir’ of the Seventies.
Tim Parchikov chose the cinema auditorium, a key image very close to him, to exhibit the project: his photographs are bright as cinema screens and accompanied by a soundtrack. Background noise that ordinarily remains unnoticed is actualised at a moment of unease, filling our perceptual field.
In Tim Parchikov’s work suspense penetrates the natural environment, the urban space, populating it with his characters.
Suspense, Tim Parchikov
Until 27 novembre
Andalusian Center of Photography
C/ Pintor Diaz Molina, 9.
CP. 04002 – Almería
España
