The exhibition “Focus on Person” opens on March 20 in Magnezit Cultural Center. The presented exhibition became a result of the laboratory of nine photographers from Satka, Bakal and Chelyabinsk that was opened in autumn and was supposed to end in December 2020. The pandemic had affected the project so that the process of exhibition opening had to be halted. The laboratory closed in the spring of 2021.

The project “Seasons” was presented in the form of an exhibition and zines in 2018. It combined the local photographers’ work on visual examination of Satka as a place to live and the surrounding landscape study. The project “Seasons” boosted a much more profound topic, such as an understanding of a human being within this landscape. The pandemic not only affected the project but made emphasis on a person not as a resource but a neighbor, someone dear to you, even as a relative. We began to take better care of people around us and ourselves. The past few months had shown that the communication via the Internet could not replace a personal interaction. We discovered that we were part of a somewhat larger society than we had thought earlier.

In addition, the laboratory set a new task to implement photo projects in more appropriate forms excluding classic photo exhibition display. Due to various techniques of printing and approaches to the topic the authors became free from certain audience’s expectations.

Nine projects presented within the exhibition combined stories about certain people as well as entire families. The topic of distance both temporal and geographic covers almost every story presented. The authors of the laboratory emphasized not just the set of facts about a person but a full story defining the character as well as the artist. The choice of a topic took almost more time than the production of works. The photographers tried to focus on a person without stereotypes and prejudice even if the author himself was the object of the work.

As a result, a short story collection about people living near us came out. These short stories are written in different techniques and with different motivation background. The exhibition included stories of people, the details of which are sometimes lost in the flow of life. The project offers to take a pause and look at the person next to you. Or to look at yourself through these stories.

Artists: Maria Kochergova, Anastasia Shakirova, Olga Kuzmenko, Elizaveta Demchenko, Anna Golenko, an anonymous author, Svetlana Zaytseva, Egor Lazurenko, Evgeniy Andreev.

Curator: Sergey Poteryaev.

The project is implemented in terms of the grant from the President of the Russian Federation with the support of the Sobranie Fund.

Photo from Magnezitovets archive. Photos by Sergey Belov, Maria Kochergova, Vasily Maksimov.