Street Photographers - Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer who has exhibited in Europe and the USA. The particular body of his work that I have focused on in my research is "City of Shadows". This body of work is to me completely enthralling, Titarenko has conveyed brilliantly the emotions he wanted to and this is a prime example of psychogeography - Titarenko was affected so much by his environment that he produced this series; "to articulate these sufferings and grieving, to visualize them through my photographs, to awaken empathy and love for my native city’s inhabitants"(Alexey Titarenko, From the interview for SHOTS magazine, 2005). The photographs have an ethereal feeling to them and they produce a dichotomy of sorts - the images to me are full, yet due to the movement in them, there feels to me to be an emptiness there at the same time. The idea behind the series came after the collapse of the Soviet Union; Titarenko was saddened that the people of his city appeared to be shadows of their once vibrant and dynamic selves. Titarenko wanted to convey this ghostly appearance in his images and he did so through the use of long shutter speeds. 

Below are some of the images from this series.