T.D: "Could you tell us about your artistic development. You are by now quite well-known in photographic circles as an artist working with different themes, but in particular with the theme of the text-image. Tell us, if you could, how it all started. How did your career as a photographer begin?

V.G. I was born in Novosibirsk in 1963. In 1986 I graduated from MEI (Moscow Economic Institute). I took up photography in 1986-1987 - beginning with attempts at self-expression of the most elementary kind, without any real knowledge of photographic theory or practice whatsoever. In 1990, having already tried out all the "club" varieties, I began to sense a conflict with traditional photography, in which I detected a thematic and aesthetic exhaustion. Possibly it was for this reason that I started working with text - although, on the other hand, I have say that text has always held a fascination for me.

I think this has to do with the long-established tradition of reading in our culture and with our literary cast of mind - we Russians are always ready to come up with literary analogies; we have ready a quotation from Dostoyevskiy or Gogol to fit every situation in life. On top of that, I have always been susceptible to the poetic charm of individual phrases taken from speech or individual inscriptions. I began to combine text and photograph, or to make text an element of the composition of a photograph, or simply to take pictures of inscriptions. I did this on a purely instinctive, visual level. The combination of text and photography is an imitational gesture of the most natural kind, which means that such combinations are non-eclectic.

To begin with, this type of combination was illustrative in character. The text was the main element and was there to be read, although even then I tried to enhance the combination aesthetically and compositionally - by searing, for example, pages of text cut out from their context. In addition, it shouldn`t be forgotten that the combination of text and image imparts a museum quality; this is an interesting effect to play with.

T.D: How did the problem of the relation of text and image develop in your work?

V.G: Continuing where we left off, I think it is important to emphasize once more that I have never considered text separately from photography and, in using text in my photographs, have always borne in mind that text which has been photographed and printed on photographic paper is a photograph of a text. My work - or rather, that part of it which is linked with textual structures - comprises a consistent sequence of imitative works. Text in my art has gradually lost its importance as a carrier of information; its narrative significance has been stripped away. In this way, transformed into image (and I do mean transformed) and stripped of its semantic significance, text becomes sort of the photograph`s second hypostasis: a paraphrase of the subject, determined and sketched according to a different system of coordinates, under which text becomes image and image text. This, possibly, is the point which demonstrates the development of my relation to text and image - a development which has resulted in text becoming text-image.

T.D: What philosophical system is close to your world-view?

V.G: In my opinion all creation is existential in as far as it is a revelation of personal experience and carries inside it what the artist has lived through (not to mention the reverse influence of the artist`s work on the personality of the artist himself). Of all the works of philosophy that I have read, the only one which offers any direct analogy with my world-view is M. Foucault`s "Words and things". Foucault writes, for instance: “Relations to texts and relations to things are of the same nature. People find signs in both the one and the other”. Or: "Nature and the word can intersect with each other to infinity, forming for he who can read a great and unified text". But more than anything my interest is drawn by Foucault`s quotations from mystics from the 14th to 16tn centuries. According to such mystics, any trace or mark can be regarded as a text which is accessible to the initiate. So the concept of text can be extended to infinity. A textual structure is encoded information, a visible token of invisible analogies, the trace left by a presence, susceptible or non-susceptible of decodement. “ls it not the case that everything - grass, trees and all else that springs from the bowels of the earth - takes the form of books and magical signs?"

Foucault gives a theoretical foundation for the visual inversion which occurs when, as a result of conceptual interchange, the idea of the text-image arises. As an artist, I feel a sympathy for this point of view.

T.D: I. Annenskiy said that in the work of every poet can be discovered a tic-word which can be used to unravel the mystery of that author`s poetry. I believe that there is a direct link between this and the pet images found in the creative world of the artist. Tell us, please: do you have "tic-images" of this kind - images which particularly in spire you?

V.G: Mostly I get my inspiration more from abstractions than from concrete things, although from a visual point of view I am attracted by many things - by nature, by ordinary household objects which fit snugly into your hand, flowers in pots and so on. Almost always when I work, my point of departure is visual material; this I either photograph specially, when trying to make photographic use of some fascinating impression given by an object, or search for in my archive of "study" negatives. Nor is the approach I take to such studies a matter of chance. Under the influence of a book which I have read or a piece of music whose "hold" on me has lasted more than just one day, I photograph things which, from a practical point of view (or from the position adopted by classical photography), are completely useless; but the material I`ve found whilst photographing is like the continuation or the visual equivalent of the material I have accumulated inside me spiritually. This is a purely intuitive search which lends itself to systemization only with great difficulty. So there you have a picture - a very general picture - of what inspires me. As far as concerns "tic-images", I think it would be more relevant to listen to your opinion of the matter - as a viewer.

T.D: I want to come at this from a bit of a distance.

I see in your works an appeal to that way of looking at things in which the representations of an object (thing) and its verbal equivalent do not fragment into separate parts, but are rather visually united by means of the photograph. In your work there is (on an intuitive level) an actively-experienced search for primary links between a textually-defined thing and its real existent.

In this system we could consider as a "tic-image" the peculiar calligraphic quality of your work in its decorative aspects, although in photography in my opinion it is not images but tokens of style that become "tics". But if we could return to our conversation, I`d like to put to you a question of a social nature: how do you feel living in these post-Soviet times?

V.G: Not too bad, overall. Of course you have to bear in mind that my career began in the post-Soviet era, so I have difficulty in comparing it with the Soviet one.

T.D: I know that you took part in the French project "In search of a father*. What interested you in this project?

V.G: That was in 1992. The task we had been set was to write a text about a father and make a photographic portrait of him. This was interesting because the interests of the project-organizers coincided entirely with my own: for me - someone who in one way or another combines text and photograph - this was entirely natural, and so I set to work quite happily. On the other hand, the project involved a completely different aspect of the combination. Firstly, I was working to a given subject, which is utterly untypical of me, but this had its interesting side too (would I be able to work "to commission"?). Secondly, the very principle of combining text and image was in this case 100% illustrative, something which I had always steered cleared of in the past. The theme itself assumed a conflict between fathers and children, and here, in distinction to everything I had done earlier, the point of departure was a literary text creating a certain image - to which I "matched" the photograph of the father, selecting various variants and determining their suitability for the text. What resulted was in fact a play with an invented plot and two actors: me and my father (although I remained outside the frame).

T.D: Having taken part in the Paris exhibition, what can you say about the directions taken by Russian and European photography - how close to or distant from each other are they?

V.G: I`m not sure whether the Month of photography in Paris is enough to judge European photography by, but, analyzing the main exhibitions I saw during the Paris programme, I can say that European photography is characterized by a greater focus on the viewer and, I suppose, on the buyer. It is almost always "pure" photography, without postmodernist or other "istic" trickery; of small or medium format, displayed in well-made frames. I did not see what I really wanted to see - work with photography; although everything else was highly interesting from the point of view of information. Possibly, Europeans have simply tired of "the avantgarde". Comparing what I saw there with what we do here, I couldn`t help feeling optimistic. We, when it comes down to it, are very original and self-sufficient. We have a ready supply of unique material, consisting of layers of the very different periods of our national culture. What`s more, having such strong cultural traditions, we simply have no right to be compilers. I believe there is such a thing as contemporary Russian photography. It is a multi-faceted phenomenon which is essentially free of a dependence on Western interest in us; although we have many problems on all levels and there is a shortage of authors working actively.

T..D: There`s another question I want to put to you: how do you feel about the problem of the new in art - above all, in photography and in your own work?

V.G: Here, Tanya, it`s vital to define the boundaries of the concept we`re dealing with, or else we`re bound to run into contradictions. In what are we looking for novelty? How does this novelty relate to photography? Obviously, from one point of view, photography - carrying the spirit of the time and being time`s optical copy - is continuously in a process of renovation as a result of the changes occurring in the world; theoretically, no two photographs can be identical, since "you can never enter the same river twice".

This we could call the social aspect of novelty. Many photographs, though realized `here and now*, periodically turn back into the past, defining the "previously-undefined”. This is why "pure” photography is so inexhaustible in its subjective significance for each person, and in its applied and cultural significance. On the other hand, there is another concept of creative novelty whereby a result is evaluated independently of the social aspect, even if only because of the latter`s vividly expressive absence.

In the middle of the 90s one can confidently say that all combinations of formal techniques (of which there are a limited number), relating both to photography and to work with photography, have been thoroughly explored. What`s more, thematic novelty also has to be doubted; it is possible only in scientific photography. Taken together, all this incredibly complicates the work of the author pretending to innovation, but at the same time sets him free - in as much as it liberates him from vain struggles for the notorious kind of novelty which is directed only at itself. I`m inclined to think that the need for novelty is the natural condition of all artists, and a need which is present in every sphere of the artist`s life. Is not the striving not to be like one another a consequence of the need for novelty? In as far as we are unable to lay our hands on the latest technology - through which some sort of cardinal novelty might be possible - our photographers are obliged to find new depths in their subjects, to look for new correlations (internal, not external) within the subject. I think that even if we did have access to the latest technology, very few would be enticed by it; technology is not what is most important. The element of personal individuality present in the print inevitably brings with it novelty of presentational context. The intuition demanded by an understanding of one`s personal set of problems assumes the construction of one`s own specific system of relations - existing only in the imagination - which must necessarily differ, even if only by an iota, from everything that has been done before if it is not to be merely a banal compilation. The artist can choose whatever formal technique he wishes, but, in using it, he must breathe into it his own meaning and must find a place for it in his own artistic system, and so on until infinity, following his own interest.