evgeny mokhorev – Acetylene Eyes (2024)

In the 1990s, Mokhorev was focused on youth culture in St. Petersburg. It was a rather different species than the bohemian, hipster rock n roll rebellion of his compatriot Igor Mukhin; There’s none of the trappings of counter culture and things seem to prosaically orbit the fact that it’s one of the most heavily populated cities nearing the Arctic Circle. Winters are bitterly cold and summer is a time people revel in. As I understand it, getting blitzed on vodka, stripping down and swimming in the Neva is a fairly commonplace occurrence.

There’s a sort of feeling of everlasting summer, of primordial pagan sunworship to his work. It also frequently features folks unabashedly cavorting around in the buff.

Some of his earlier work was a bit disconcerting–frequently featuring nude pre-teens and teens. I’ve spent the morning revisiting his work and what impresses me is that although it is ostensibly interested in nudism, it avoids the trappings of the other two prominent artists interested in nudism, Mona Kuhn and Jock Sturges (in the case of the former, the works remain antisepctic and are less concerned with the conveyance of an sort of concept beyond a sort of idyllic reverie and instead pivot upon questions of form, representation of space and color; whereas Sturges is a perverted hack who dresses up his pedaphiliac ideation in the trappings of fine art legitimacy–I was at one time a fan of his work but increasingly it creeps me out and the work itself relies more on the perception of technical mastery, while demonstrating no such acumen in point of practice.)

I’ve been wary of his work before. Unlike Sturges, however, I have always been fond of it–and suspicious of that fondness. These images make me feel more justified in my admiration.

Here’s some things I noticed about his more recent work. [↑] bears more than a passing resemblance to Mark Steinmetz’s Jessica, Athens (1997); Steinmetz is objectively the better photo, but it feels as if Mokhorev only fell short because he was more ambitious in attempting to convey a similar feeling but also opening up the frame more. (I’d bet $20 that he’s very familiar with Steinmetz.) [↗] I like this because it’s a fundamentally intriguing image but also I’m curious what it is he’s holding and he looks a bit like a hedgehog; [+] between the watch on the necklace and the smoke stack behind her (which reminds me of the scene in Mark Romanek’s music video for // | /’s The Perfect Drug, where there’s a funerary urn that has crushed someone leaving only a pair of legs in riding breaches reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz; [↘] this might as well be channeling Rodchenko from beyond the beyond.

The last thing is a technical note. I am certain Mokhorev favors Ilford film stocks. And I am reasonably convinced he uses HP5 pretty much exclusively. While it is absolutely better than the comparable Delta 400 Pro–which is garbage, fwiw–it’s a finicky stock. It’s impressive that he’s getting these kind of results from it. Damn impressive actually. I’d have said that it wasn’t possible prior to seeing these. Also, another little known analog tidbit, there are subtle differences in the emulsion between different formats. The grain is usually more or less the same but there are differences in contrast, dynamic range and tonality. But the backing is always different–especially with Ilford. All the above are medium format except [↓], which is 4×5 sheet film–it’s possible this is not HP5 but in my experience 4×5 has a completely different feel to it than the 35 and 120 formulations of the same stock.

Evgeny Mokhorev – Girls from Teenagers of St. Petersburg series (1996)

This is edgy in all the ways I crave for photography to be edgy.

Beyond that I’m not sure what else I can say about it. Except, except… OMFG, it reminds me of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe. (TRIGGER WARNING: if you are a person with any sort of trigger, this film will unquestionably be a problem for you; proceed with caution.)

If you haven’t heard of it’s the story of the seedy underbelly of a Ukrainian boarding school for deaf teens. There is zero spoken dialogue; everything is in sign language and subtitles are intentionally withheld.

It’s riveting and brilliant and unconscionably brutal.

It’s also ballsy as f*ck–almost every scene occurs in a single uninterrupted long take, which if not up to the standards of someone like Béla Tarr you are pretty much required to overlook the sometimes less than perfect framing by virtue of the fact of how completely batsh*t f*cking crazy camera tai chi several of the scenes are.