The exhibition “Poetics of the City. Leningrad 1950-1960s” presents original prints by Evgeny Zlobin from the ROSPHOTO collection
The name of the actor, director, and teacher Evgeny Pavlovich Zlobin (1928–1997) is closely associated with Leningrad culture. For many decades, he directed the Vyborg Side People's Theater in the Vyborgsky Community Center and staged plays there, was a television director, and taught at Leningrad (State) Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography (LGITMiK). He trained several generations of theater directors and television professionals.
Evgeny Zlobin had another hobby in his life — photography, the skills that he mastered on his own. Perhaps that is why his amateur photography legacy, consisting of several hundred prints and films, is a kind of “mirror” of the bright biography of a talented and versatile person.
Arriving in Leningrad in 1954 after receiving an acting education and working at the Sverdlovsk Musical and Drama Theater, Evgeny Zlobin entered the State Theater Institute in 1955, in the directing department, to the unique teacher Alexander Alexandrovich Muzil, where he studied in the same year with Alexey German, the elder, Leonid Menaker and Viktor Sudarushkin. During preparation for entrance exams and further studies, interest in the city, its inhabitants, the atmosphere of the university inspired the future director to create a large photographic series dedicated to Leningrad.
The city views and sketches stand out among the author's other prints. Being evidence of the era when social conditions and personal development formed "advanced" amateur photographers, they represent an interesting case of a visionary reading of the space of Leningrad by a person from the theater environment. Like many amateur photographers, Zlobin, having learned the craft and mastered the technique, looked for his own theme and set himself more complex artistic tasks.
Taking images of Leningrad, he discovers a city of rhythms, silhouettes and shadows, in which the former Petersburg is perceived through the optics of the "thaw view" of a contemporary of the new era. Squares, embankments and monuments are not only flooded with sunlight or washed by rain. Sometimes they are immersed in an atmosphere of gray haze and gloom. The author sees Leningrad of the 1950s-1960s as ghostly and enchanting.
According to the testimony of those close to him, Evgeny Zlobin considered photography "an obligatory occupation for a director", an operational assistant in the analysis of a changing life. Using the camera as an "instrument of thought", he tried to capture in the geometry of contours and lines, the play of forms and textures, the whims of the weather the "characters" and "roles" of the city. His sketches, despite the apparent simplicity of their plots, form a system of visual poetics, where images of urban space show the changing character of St. Petersburg – Leningrad.
The theme of "character" is played out in the documentary series "Persons", filmed by Zlobin near the Hermitage in May 1962. Passers-by of different ages and social status as a result of street observation and the chosen moment of photographic recording become persons, acquire character. Along with photographs of Palace Square, Nevsky Prospect, Anichkov Bridge, Kazan Cathedral, and other historical places, the "Persons" series marks the "thaw" interest in the life and space of the city. Such interest could have been possessed by a more indifferent amateur photographer, taught by the theater to see the individuality hidden behind a person's appearance.
Theater and television have always been the main activities of Evgeny Zlobin. Photography sometimes helped serve the great arts. During his studies and further teaching at the theater institute, he made student portfolios and portraits of colleagues. The heroes of his photographs were theatrical authorities, outstanding teachers Boris Zon and Alexander Muzil, Alisa Freindlich, who had not yet become famous, artists, friends, acquaintances – ballerina Galina Mezentseva, director Lev Tsutsulkovsky, artist Valentina Brook, as well as later famous classmates. Zlobin's archive contains many portraits of the author himself in his youth, taken by professionals in theatrical photography. He is captured in costumes of characters from various plays at the peak of his acting career.
In the mid-1980s, Evgeny Zlobin stopped doing photography. Most of the surviving photographs of the master are associated with the 1950-1960s – a period of impressions, hopes, creative searches and active work in the theater.
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