
Kunstkamera
- Publisher
- Treemedia
- Year
- 2016
- ISBN
- 978-952-68506-2-7
- Specifications
- hardcover
250 x 175 mm
192 pages
edition of 1500
co-published with Galereya Pechati
Alexander Petrosyan's Kunstkamera is a portrait of Saint Petersburg and its inhabitants - kind and naive, cruel and frightening, buffoons and holy fools, the powerful and the powerless. Built from reportage frames in which the great city plays as central a role as in any postcard view, these are unmistakably Petersburg photographs, not only because the settings of civic events and anniversaries are instantly recognisable but because every face in them, beautiful or repellent, carries the mark of the northern capital. Balls and masquerades give way to proletarian demonstrations, churches are built, destroyed and rebuilt, wholesale atheism gives way to mass religious observance, the city survives a siege, changes its name twice and returns to the original, the Summer Garden is redesigned beyond recognition - and through it all the faces of its residents stay the same, in a book that reads as the quintessence of Petersburg's mythology and aesthetics, where the beautiful and the monstrous feed on one another and neither can be removed without the other collapsing too.