When we see a photograph, do we ask what path the artist has followed? Do we know their habits, their ways, their styles of working? Do we guess at their spontaneity or their slow process of germination? The series World and Thoughts continues with Ukrainian photographer Sergey Melnitchenko. Born in 1991 in Mykolayiv (Ukraine), he received this year the Leica Newcomer Award for his series Behind the Scenes, showing in bright colours and close-up backstage and lodges of Chinese club dancers in Chengdu.
The title chosen by Sergey Melnitchenko is perfectly responding to our series. “With Behind the scenes, I was only working with my surroundings, with people nearby and behind the stage, in the dressing room. It was aimed to show the atmosphere inside, not outside the dressing room.” The photographer wants first to understand for himself what was being going on before the moment of representation. During a month, Sergey Melnitchenko approached the girls with whom he shares a lodge. He was curious and obstinate. He was accepted by the girls. They frequently asked for pictures and get caught up in the game. “Whenever the girls were in a good mood, they asked me to take pictures with them. They were preparing poses, they were already ready to be photographed. By the end of the month, they had completely accepted my presence. I was there every day with my camera.” His presence remains discreet, sometimes tolerated, sometimes refused. “Most of the situations, I was refused when the girls were drunk. Sometimes the manager also asked me not to take pictures. I replied ‘I only do it for myself, to put them inside my computer’.” He was either not interested in customers.
Behind the Scene would not have been possible without successions of several factors. Strokes of fate and little lucky, a dozen of confluences, they made the series possible. The photographer arrived in China as a dancer in 2015. If he was a photographer since 2009, Sergey Melnitchenko worked mostly as a dancer. “Since I’m five I’ve danced, 20 years from now.” With his Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian friends, he created a hip-hop, jazz, soul and club dance company. They started a tour in China. After sailing in the vast country, they completed their trip by ending in Hong Kong and Shenzen. From 9 pm to 1 am, they danced, immediately followed by girls, preparing a more erotic program. All were Chinese dancers, they did not speak English. Therefore, he learned Chinese on the spot, gibbering two three words to be accepted among them. He continued, pragmatic. “I think dance helped me with doing photography. If I hadn’t dance, I wouldn’t come to China and do my series, I wouldn’t end up in a project by Leica.”
Another significant factor was his purchase of a new camera – a Canon 6D – shortly before arriving in Chengdu. “It all started accidentally. I just took it one night in the club, because I did not had the opportunity to do so before. I began to test it. And when I got home I thought, “And, it looks good to me. From then on, I took it every day with me.” In his photographs, one can see the care brought by Sergey Melnitchenko to the colours, details of the buttocks tangled in stringed tights. He seems to seek the instant, not the eternal fateful moment thousands of times rebuffed. On the contrary that benign instant, made of repeated gestures to usury, devoid of grace and yet full of a filthy eroticism. His photographs seem to be dominated by monochromatic colours. The fadded gold of the dancers’ legs on a dark background, neon pink on their closed and relaxed faces, the chartreuse yellow and the lime green of the faded walls. Decades have gone by and Gordon Brown’s Showgirls seems to be renewed. However, Melnichenko does not count influences, he does not have ‘a photographic education’, he justifies himself. “I go to intuition. When I played with these colours, I realized that the result was a scene, as in movies. So I thought that colours could play a powerful role in the image. They were just simple colours like the white one of the box.”
A charm of Behind the Scenes is also due to the promiscuity of the subjects along with the photographer. One said you’re never close enough, never too close to the subject. This is not true of Melnichenko. After dancing from 9 am to 1 am, he slipped into the box. He had payed attention to details without shedding obscene detail. He silently passed through the narrow corridors of the lodges and photographs through the doors, grey curtains, playing with reflections of a mirror, isolating each of the dancers and revealing their loneliness, their detached concentration, their routine. Here lied the power of his series: being attentive to the restitution of a sticky, raw and pleasant atmosphere.
Arthur Dayras
Arthur Dayras is an author specialized in photography who lives and works in Paris.
Sergey Melnitchenko was born in 1991 in Mykolayiv, Ukraine and nowadays lives and works in China.
www.melnitchenko.com
