Album of the best photos of Yuri Rost, photographer and writer.
The photographer and writer Yuri Rost presents himself in the book as a passerby. Only he is such a passer-by who “does not pass by”, this is a very vigilant passer-by, discovering jewelry at every step and carefully preserving them — in his soul, in memory, in the frame. He sees a huge world, everywhere — from Greenland to Madagascar, from Russia to Ecuador — inhabited by beautiful creatures: people, cats, dogs, horses, giraffes … And what mountains, meadows, rocks, sky are in this world! No, it has its own deformities: «monster-state», «ambitious and cowardly politicians», all sorts of lackeys and scoundrels. But they are so little valuable that his eyes do not linger on them. Why — when there is Academician Sakharov and a roofer-encyclopedist Andreich with a cat Dusey, Faina Ranevskaya and the «naive» artist Maria Primachenko, Yuri Norshtein and astrophysicist Chechelnitsky, singer Pete Seeger, with whom you can cross the Atlantic Ocean on a small yacht, and hundreds more famous and unknown people who became the characters of the book, sometimes insanely funny, sometimes painfully sad, each page powerfully drawing love into its orbit. A precious gift to all of us from Yuri Rost.
We decided to present Growth’s book with a small portfolio — five landscapes and fragments of texts related to them into a whole, complete statement. And they asked the author: why should he, a virtuoso master of photography, shoot nature? What is he looking for in her?
Yuri Rost:
It hurts me when I see something superfluous in a natural landscape. Nature is self-sufficient, it is a «pure genre». And human intervention spoils it. Therefore, in nature, I seek the absence of man. The absence of his participation — whatever it was.
In this book, nature is presented in the colors that the Creator created it, but people are still black and white, because they completed building themselves. However, no, sometimes there are people in color, but only where it is appropriate. Where a person is inscribed in nature, and does not put his own order in it. Sometimes a monastery, even destroyed, becomes part of nature, does not harm it. And the wires and roads will definitely interfere, break the harmony.
When photographing nature, of course, I do not reveal its secret — I just save it for others. Because tomorrow this landscape may already disappear. A man builds a dam or a road here — and there will be no more secrets. But on a planetary scale, nature is certainly much stronger than man. If a person exceeds his powers, she will simply crush him. Remember: one small volcano spat — and half the world was paralyzed. So nature has such an opportunity. And I am for her.
Y. Rost «Group portrait against the backdrop of the world» (Alpina Publisher, 2013).