It is not enough to simply be inspired to pick up a camera, or a guitar, a pen or tilt your head back and sing your heart out. At first, you find your way, but eventually you need to wrap your arms around an intention. I used to believe that. You are supposed to hide in a shed making half-baked masterpieces, scrap them and try to make a better one until you are finally ready to throw the doors wide open and share your gems with friends and strangers.
Now, I think a bit differently. There is something incredibly powerful in your work when you are naive. Not knowing the rules means you don't even realize you are breaking them. It is far too easy to get bogged down in self-doubt, in a struggle towards the creative stone that has not been turned just yet. We all yearn for unknown territory, unknown space, story, sound. It is possible to find. It exists.
I have been looking at some of the pictures I take here - typically of Soviet era playgroundss, old shacks, concrete monoliths where people park their Lada. I was drawn to their timelessness, the fact that they still stand, the patina of decades on their skins. There is always something beautiful and exotic about old doors and locks, peeling paint, haphazard corners and crooked walls. They are sad and peaceful, and they have born witness to dramas and comedies that I can only imagine. Scratch their surface and you will always find more. But what I never expected is for these places to be torn down, weeks or even days after I took them. I never had the formal intention of documenting a disappearing Moscow but in hindsight that is exactly what I have been doing. Can I claim it after the fact? I don't think anyone really cares but the lesson in this is that it all happened by accident.
We all feel the tug of nostalgia, the cool breeze that whispers in our ears "this will all be gone someday". But having that someday be the next week is something we are never prepared for. I took this picture of a sad little plant that stands on a windowsill in the stairwell of our building. Why? I think I felt there was something Edward Hopper about the light, that minty green wall and how it never looked warm even in the softest summer afternoon. I waited for a sunny day, knowing the light would be right at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. How long this moldy smelling husk of a plant stood there I cannot say. I imagined it had always been there, for decades.
The next day, it was gone.
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