Preface to the book "City of the Black Sun"

The photographer builds a City from the city. He is given nothing else as a source material. Two- and three-story post-war buildings, plaster fountains and bowls, Stalinist Empire palaces, courtyards of Kirgorodok and similar areas, swings and benches, angular roofs, fire escapes, rowan and apple trees, partly cut by a utility worker's saw, partly neglected and spreading their branches wherever their tree soul desires.

The photographer builds his City from light and darkness, accumulating these two matters in the matrix of a digital camera, comparing and matching their gradations, distilling, purifying, saturating.

At some point, an architectural and natural object or human material extracted from everyday life ceases to be equal to it and ascends to its original form. The plaster bowl shines with pure silver, the leaves are cut by the patient and passionate chisel of a jeweler, the trees pierce the Cosmos with pillars of light, the brickwork breathes eternity, and the yard boys freeze in the poses and appearances of Pre-Raphaelite angels.

Behind the loose layer of socio-cultural patina, the City emerges, bleached by Astakhov's artistic program and the technical program of his camera. Like wood or stone, leached by the sea to its core. The idea of the City is written in clear planes, rising and falling diagonals, soft semicircles and sharp angles, pure white areas of light and coal-black zones of darkness, transparent polygonal structures encoding the movement of time and memory, a scattering of glare, almost losing touch with its cause: a cracked roof, apple blossom or splashes of rain. One more step into abstraction - and the city will disappear. The walls and people, gateways and branches, clouds and roofs will disappear. Only the idea of light will remain.

But the transformations occur in a wide range of sentimental-sensual warmth and sublime-philosophical coolness, and this protects against speculation.

Oleg Astakhov's photographs provoke a poetic narrative and at the same time stop speech, eager for descriptions. The silhouette of a person, the steam of his breath, a gesture or a glance... Plastic rhymes of shadows, arches, open curtains and open arms, the hunching of a tree and a person, enfilades of courtyards receding into the spatial distance, and detached faces opening up another, mysterious perspective of invisible depth...

This dual belonging of the City to the visible and invisible, the objective and the metaphysical, is evident in the choice of objects and the method of their photographic processing, in the fusion of two or more exposures, which suggests that there are timeless and spaceless worlds (of spirit, thought, memory) suitable for such fusions.

And the more indefinite the boundary between worlds, the more completely it disappears in the chiaroscuro plasma, the more difficult it is to bring the photograph to syntax, the better the photograph becomes. The architectural and social space of Chelyabinsk, transforming into a lyrical and poetic image of the City, finally achieves the properties of the Invisible City, one of those cities of desires, cities of memories, hidden, refined, continuous cities, about which Italo Calvino wrote:

“Sometimes, seeing an unexpected angle of the landscape or a glimmer of light in the fog, hearing the conversation of passers-by who met in the bustle of the street, I think: this is where I will begin to gradually build an ideal city from such fragments, mixed with all sorts of things, from moments separated by intervals, signals sent by someone into space. And although I tell you that the city to which my path lies is scattered in space and time - in some places more sparsely, in others more densely - do not think that you can stop looking for it. Probably, even now, as we speak, it is peeping out here and there in your domains, and you can discover it” (I. Calvino “Invisible Cities”).

Olga Confederate, candidate of cultural studies, associate professor at Chelyabinsk State University.