A country of ghosts, a city of shadows – shadows of someone’s memories, someone’s hopes and dreams. In the morning the fog drops, hiding the essence of the space around.And in an hour, three, five, cool shades of gray will hide behind a rich palette of color overflows, which, like people, blended in one plane of time and place. Here the eternalmorning, and the future, it seems, is no more than 100 feet away.
In this country, it is impossible to live apart. Escaping from the existing systems of human interactions, you create your own, in which you are a tiny grain of sand on the beach. Events of a national scale do not happen to you – they are always somewhere near, and you still become their unwitting participant. All that you are allowed to do is to pass the external impressions through the internal filter, trying to understand what is happening,trying to see yourself in someone else.
It’s not someone else getting on the train to leave his homeland forever – it’s you getting into the last car of the departing train. It’s not someone else walking, completely drenched,along the dark avenue into the night or out of it – it’s you going. You go, because you can-not act differently. Everything around – it’s all you. The variability of your future totally depends on the number of the unused frames of the film in your camera.
When the morning is over, the day will pass and the evening will come, you can stand on the top of the hill, cast your gaze down to the city, and see that somewhere in the endless string of lights there is a window in which you are awaited and welcomed. And there, inthe distant avenue, the lights of a thousand cars blink. Who knows, maybe those are the flashlights of a trolley bus that will take you to your window? The city is breathing, andyou are a part of it.
On the outskirts of Europe, there is a country in which simple and complex people live simple and complex lives. A country with a very high concentration of happiness and grief per one square kilometer. The country that so often visits me in my dreams. I am its silent witness, and all I can do is try to express its condition through myself and through my photos.
About Mikhail Kalarashan
Mikhail Kalarashan – photographer, based in Chisinau, Moldova. Works in documen- tary photography, landscapes and portrait.
I was born on July 27, 1993 in Rybnitsa, Transnistria. In 2000 I was admitted to mid-dle school No. 10 in Rybnitsa, PMR. In 2009 I passed into the Russian theoretical lyceum “A.S. Pushkin” in Rezina, Moldova. In 2012 I entered on psychological faculty in ULIM. In 2015 I successfully defended thesis on clinical psychology on the subject “The life quality of persons with diagnosis diabetes mellitus of the II type”. In 2015 I have continued themaster course on clinical psychology in the same universi- ty. In 2017 I entered the Acad-emy of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography “Fotografika” in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In my work as a documentary photographer of fine arts, I seek to express the real world that will be aesthetically, emotionally and coloristically convincing at the same time.Being the documentary photographer, I follow the form which can transfer the spiritualstate of objects, people. As I am only an observer, I create work wich is a fact of reality, but with the help of colors, forms and balance I bring this fact to the high level of sensual,not rational perception. I can divide my work into two main components: transfering thethings as they are, which will be apprehended literally, de facto. And the work with color,light and form is directed on deduction and increases sensual and logic perception of aframe. I work in both formats: analog and digital. The choice falls on what will make theaesthetics of the frame stronger. [Official Website]
