Winners

The project looks into the mystery of triumph. Employing the method of straight analog photography, it poetically compares prodigious children with galaxies hidden within the darkness of the world.

This series of portrait-diptychs celebrates the winners of the All-Russian School Olympiad in Astronomy. Having won in the most prestigious intellectual competition and been photographed as winners, they are yet to be recognized.

‘When face to face you cannot see the face. The great is seen from a distance’.

Immediately after the results of the Olympiad were announced (at that potent moment, when any winner feels that any their goal is achievable) I used a flipped telescope with a film camera attached to its front lens to photograph those victorious children. By doing that I literally distanced those people from me, so that in the vastness of a 35mm film-frame they became lost minute spots.

Some time later in the scary emptiness of the photographic space amid dust, scratches and other imperfections of the physical medium I was looking for those talents using a microscope and photographically documenting my findings. And in those documents the found winners appeared as forming events of galactic scale.

Are these portraits of the future Noble prize winners, saviours of the Earth, businessmen, politician, artists, beggars? The answer to this question is veiled by the distance of time.