Alexey Viktorovich Titarenko (Russian: Алексей Викторович Титаренко; born 1962 in Leningrad, USSR, now Saint Petersburg, Russia) is a Russian photographer and artist. At age 15, he became the youngest member of the independent photo club Zerkalo [Mirror]. He went on to graduate from the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad's Institute of Culture.His series of collages and photomontages "Nomenklatura of Signs" (first exhibited in 1989, in Leningrad) is a commentary on the Communist regime as an oppressive system that converts citizens into mere signs.In 1990, "Nomenklatura of Signs" was included in Photostroyka, a major show of new Soviet photography that toured the US.After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 he produced several series of photographs about human condition of the Russian people during this time and the suffering they have endured throughout the twentieth century. To illustrate links between the present and the past, he created powerful metaphors by introducing long exposure and intentional camera movement into street photography. The most well-known series from this period is "City of Shadows," whose urban landscapes reiterate the Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or Potemkin Stairs) scene from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin. Inspired by the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, he also translated Dostoevsky's vision of the Russian soul into sometimes poetic, sometimes dramatic pictures of his native city, Saint Petersburg. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Titarenko
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