Anne Fishbein

II took my first trip to Russia in 1990 as part of a film crew. The director of the narrative film project, Chris Schmidt, had budgeted for my position as video and still photographer to honor a pact we had made in college that I had long since forgotten. We had had the idealistic presence of mind back then to pledge that if we were ever in a position to help out each other’s creative pursuits later in life, we would do so. Chris had been traveling back and forth to Russia several times for work. It occurred to him that what could only be vaguely described as the “intangible essence” of the place reminded him of an underlying thread that he saw unifying my photographs over the years. Chris created that first opportunity for me to get to Russia, the city of Yaroslavl to be more exact and as he had intuited, it was a destination of great visual importance for me. Photographing yearly in the same city since 1990 has allowed me to explore a kind of time and cultural ambiguity with greater and greater access and scrutiny. I have always been strongly impacted by images created a long time ago. I think part of my fascination has to do with the way black and white imagery can transcend day-to-day reality in to a kind of poeticized state. Russia’s connection to its past combined with economic, social and political circumstances, have, until very recently, created an atmosphere that appears lost in time. Consequently, I have been able to explore content through a form which refers back to the initial spark that brought me to photography at the beginning. Russia continues to evolve but its people insist that there is a part of it that has always remained constant. It is that intangible essence that I’ve attempted to identify through the photographs and it is the thing that will keep me returning.