Girls from the Outskirts

The history of portrait photography is when the model sits in front of a black box, and the photographer is behind him, under a black cloth. The model painfully, for a long time (maybe a few seconds, but they seem endless) peers into the round mirror of the lens. Then click and it’s done.

Philosopher Vilém Flusser does not have the concept of a photographer. There is an apparatus — a single whole of a photographic camera and a person — like a centaur or a sphinx.

Videnin manages, being incredibly connected to his camera, the old Rolleiflex, being indebted to it for the square of the composition and the beauty of the tonal drawing, to turn out to be that very kind person, under whose gaze it is not scary to look into the eyes of eternity.

Oleg Videnin loves music. Old rock and jazz, blues and just good melodies. He loves good words, precisely placed in their places. Perhaps photography is a joy for him, like playing the blues or writing a poem, short and poignant, so that it combines memories, gratitude for the meeting and expectations of tomorrow.

In his photographic wanderings, Videnin often finds himself on the outskirts. Not necessarily on the outskirts of a city. The outskirts are a protected place, a threshold, a border between worlds: wild, barbaric, forest/steppe and human, orderly and lawful. On the border between worlds live people, in whose very nature, in the code of their DNA, the borderland leaves its mark. People of the outskirts fearlessly look to the future, seeing signs of its hopelessness around them. This essence of life-confrontation is passed down from generation to generation. Along the female line.

Girls from the Outskirts is the purest embodiment of the light, “transient” beauty of age, state of mind and sorrows, through which the fragile power of femininity, resisting the onslaught of time and circumstances, still plays. Girls from the Outskirts of Videnino is a shimmering ball of impressions, in which lyrical poetry, glorifying the beauty of a woman, from her birth to her departure into eternity, shimmers with echoes of tragedy and lamentation (a genre of the ancient tradition of versification), and an epic tale about the Polyanitsas, warriors and defenders of their native land.

Irina Chmyreva 2022