Alexey Titarenko’s time-lapse photos appear to be living proof that there are such things as ghosts, another dimension, a hidden world surfacing from beneath the facade of our own. In fact they are for the main part rather pedestrian settings taken after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most memorable collections, at least personally is his series entitled City of Shadows (1992 -1994) features Russian commuters entering and exiting office buildings and railway stations. The sombre and moody black and white photography is used to full effect to conjure up an otherworldly vision of a society in a state of flux. Be it politically, economically or emotionally, the Russian population is in a such a rush towards a brighter capitalist future that they seem lost, out of sync with both their past and present. The great ideals and injustices of a failed Communist vision distorted by the greed of capitalism and false hopes of a greater justice for all.

For those in the West his unique perspective on humanity, be it in the City of Shadows series, or later collections such as Time Standing Still (1998 – 2000) hang with a weight that surpasses cultural idiom and political dogma, perhaps an allegory for the time we now all live by, one of over-population, collapse of true individuality and even to some extent mortality itself. We are all but ghosts in the machine, living in a post-modernist quagmire of scientific subjectivity and social upheaval. The truth is that no one has all the answers, if there's one thing this race suffers from, the human race that is, it is a complete and utter lack of understanding for itself, as a whole, as one people, one enormous being composed of billions of cells that flow through the life stream we call society in order to win or lose what little is on offer as recompense for the struggle of survival.

When one encounters a photo by Titarenko, one is faced with the prospect that our time on this earth is fleeting, we are merely one of many who will enter the state of mortality for what is relatively speaking a blink of an eye on a universal, or even global scale. As many geologists and palaeontologists like to point out, if the earth had existed for 24 hours, the human race would only be seconds old. The fact is we have hardly got started and already we've made a mess of things. The natural course of action for most people, to avoid insanity and depression is to ignore everything and everyone as much as possible. If we took everything we see and know to heart most of us would most likely never leave our beds. The astronomical odds against the human race surviving more than a few hundred years without at least coming to near extinction provide a backdrop to an age old quandary of all humans, we just don't live long enough to understand, what we are, why we are here, and what the hell is this place anyway.

Engrossing oneself in the immediate can provide a short term solution, a way of accepting that an individual existence can be worthwhile, no matter what the maths might prove otherwise. Relativity is a stronghold of physics, but when the same idea is turned towards humanity most people would rather not know how little effect they will most likely have on their fellow man, their society, their age, and of course history. Even as a collective many would say we have tipped over the brink, the peak of what and who we are. We no longer have all the answers, the truth being we never did, but when we lived under the allusion that anything was possible, whole nations would strive towards the same goal, keeping their sights firmly fixed on the manifest wonders of a proposed future metaphorically lingering just over the horizon.

This kind of thinking has been taken advantage of by all forms of power, all governments, and now even corporations and the media have got in on the act. But it doesn't work any more, grandstanding, political gesturing, and the power of the word has faded. People no longer agree on the best way forward, with the advent of the Chaos Theory it possible to calculate the failure of almost any collective action, and no matter what the car companies and their gamut of ecologically minded advertising campaigns might tell us, if one person on the earth experiences luxury, another does suffer. For every rise of a great civilisation another must fall. For every King, Queen, or Emperor, a long line of bloody battles and dead monarchs must precede. For every winner a loser, for every success in greed, their is failure and loss. Now we might all say this is simple the law of survival, the fact is we have worked for centuries to enable at least a minority of the human race to avoid such savage tenets, extending life chemically and biologically, resisting the forces of nature through all technological means possible, and increasing the ability to destroy enemies across the globe a billion fold.

We are in fact ghosts of a history yet to pass. We, like the Soviet Union, like all empires of the past, will fade away in the annals of time, merely a footnote in a series of events seemingly disconnective in hindsight. Titarenko brings home one message above all else, we as unique beings, as individuals, drown in the conformity of the mass, fade physically and mentally against a matrix of dogma and belief, and simply survive as we know best. Here's wishing all the best to those who do arrive after us, in the great lottery of the history of the human race, someone, somewhere must finally stumble across the answer, be it scientific, spiritual, emotional or otherwise. Our success is adversely our failure, the longer we live, the more we breed, the less import any of us sustain as individuals.

See more of the haunting vision of Alexey Titarenko at www.alexeytitarenko.com.

This post is tagged black and white, dead, ghosts, moody, photography, Russia, Soviet, Titarenko