PRESS

[click below to view articles]

• The Wallstreet Journal, November 2015
• The New Yorker, May 2015
• ARTnews, June 2014
• The New York Times, June 2013
• StyleZeitgeist Magazine, Summer 2013
• The Baltimore Sun, June 2012
• The New Yorker Magazine, March 2012
• The Wall Street Journal, March 2012
• ZOOM, special issue ON BLACK & WHITE, winter 2011
• Black & White Photography Magazine, United Kingdom, June 2010
• ARTnews, April 2010
• The Wall Street Journal, March 2010
• FRENCH revue de modes N14, spring-summer 2009 [French version]
• FRENCH revue de modes N14, spring-summer 2009 [English version]
• The New York Sun, Alexey Titarenko’s Venetian Style, April 24, 2008
• The New Yorker Magazine, April 7, 2008
• Hemispheres Magazine, April 2008
• The Irish Times, May 2007
• Art in America, June/July 2006
• The New York Times, March 2006
• New York The Sun, March 2006
• The New Yorker, March 2006
• The New Yorker, February 2006
• Shots, Interview by Russell Joslin, 2005
• PHOTOMAGAZIN, Moscow, Russia, March 2005
• The Moscow Times, April 2004
• Houston Cronicle, March 2004
• LANDSCAPE, Photographs of Time and Space, by Ferdinand Protzman
• The New York Times, October 2003
• Beaux Arts Magazine, France, February 2003
• Liberation, France, July 2002
• LA Times, August 2001

SELECTED QUOTATIONS FROM THE PRESS

"Mr.Titarenko (born 1962) is a master of photographic technique, not only with his camera but also in the darkroom, where he produces exquisite prints - some delicately toned, all different ... Mr.Titarenko’s art, like that of Shostakovich, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, all of whom he admires, is bound up with the suffering of the Russian people..."
-- William Meyers
WALL STREET JOURNAL


"Titarenko presents the city as mystical and eerie, a reflection of the many tragedies that occurred there throughout much of the 20th century...
Titarenko’s key inspiration is not contemporary photographic practice, but rather music, and particularly that of Shostakovich ... The best of his black-and-white pictures allow for details that situate the scene in time and place ... Many photographers in recent years have employed "blur", but Titarenko applies it to street photography, transforming straight reportage into haunting poetry."
-- Barbara Pollack
ART NEWS


"The eye and memory are hypnotized by the supernatural tinges and substances, neither black-and-white nor color, but an intermediate zone that might symbolize the space separating the living from the dead ... Remembrance and memory are the grand preoccupation of this attentive reader of Proust and Dostoyevsky. In this way, the shadows enlivening the setting are appropriate to a fragile construction."
-- Michel Guerrin
LE MONDE


"Which of the twenty shows at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles are the most important to see? ... For those who have no fear of loyalty to black-and-white, and are eager to add nuances to the range: Titarenko ... Immobile in the neoclassical lines of its buildings, this particular St. Petersburg is not the monumental "Venice of the North" of postcards, but a city without makeup, quotidian and yet specific, its character portrayed in the misty sketch of its stern facades: rows of windows, porches, alleys formed by a series of courtyards, slippery streets. A world of fog bred with snow, corroded by dusky shadows, broken by inexplicable shafts of sunlight, slowly comes to life. These places are not inhabited: they are haunted. The city shivers with the incessant flow of an army of shadows, a disembodied quivering of hands and legs devoid of torsos, revealing on the immobility of the living, lurking in the sepulchral darkness of winter or embedded in the coagulated clarity of a peculiar summer.
-- A.-D. Bouzet
LIBERATION


"[I]n the purest tradition of documentary photography, Titarenko plucks fragments from daily life with no staging whatsoever. But the use of long exposures and the subtlety of his black-and-white cameos endow the reality he confronts with a metaphysical dimension, timeless and introspective."
-- Veronique Bouruet-Aubertot
BEAUX ARTS MAGAZINE


"In 'Untitled (Old Woman Sitting on Sidewalk)' (1999), the viewer comes face to face with a chilling reality in the form of a defeated soul. A woman sits, a note in her hand, looking quite still as a dark and looming sea of humanity passes her by. Time does seem to stand still, when one is faced with great loss or adversity, and this photograph captures this moment in a truly timeless fashion."
-- D. Dominick Lombardi
THE NEW YORK TIMES


"Alexey Titarenko's intriguing photographs... instead of seizing an instant and preserving it intact, they embrace a span of time, allowing it to pass and leave just a trace ... In one especially poignant example from 1999, an older Russian woman in archetypal heavy coat, scarf and boots sits on the pavement, that seems to erode beneath her ... The picture brings to mind Dorothea Lange's 'White Angel Bread Line' of 1932 in its stunning portrait of the singularity of suffering."
-- Leah Ollman
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES


"The nuances of Titarenko's prints convey solitude and arrested motion, the blurred effect of long exposures and the camera’s intentional movement ... The photographs are driven by an intense interest in the esthetics of the image."
-- Edward Leffingwell
ART IN AMERICA


"Attuned to atmosphere rather than architecture, his poignant images - particularly of people - are often deliberately blurred, a metaphor for life's uncertainty. Dostoevsky, still a haunting presence in the city, is at times Mr. Titarenko's inspiration in conveying its noirish aspects. In 'Untitled (Stranger)' of 1996, two indistinct figures, seen through lines of slanting snow before a building lighted only by a basement window, make a scene right out of 'Crime and Punishment.'"
-- Grace Glueck
THE NEW YORK TIMES


"Titarenko's prints are contemporary views of the city and its people ... Throughout, however, there remains a certain gentility and romance, like late Impressionist painting of rain-soaked Paris."
-- Patricia C. Johnson
THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE


"Titarenko's image of St. Petersburg presents the compressed urban space as abounding in dichotomies and gray areas. In big cities, beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, violence and serenity are never far apart."
-- Ferdinand Protzman
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC


"Alexey Titarenko's work evocatively captures a tumultuous decade in his native St. Petersburg ... [I]t is their contradictory mixture of vagueness and precision that makes [these images] exceptional."
-- Aiden Dunne
THE IRISH TIMES