It is the rhythm of my breath that I, being a photographer, a "man with a camera", try to control my actions and their results. When breathing is especially light and the air feels heady, fills you with joy, like the air in the mountains with a spectacular view on even higher mountains, then you are not mistaken. For a moment you become a magician, you are able to enliven a knowingly dead object, like, say, a drain cover built into asphalt, capture its tricky grin, look into the empty eye pits not only of the Bronze Horseman but his horse as well — everything is possible as long as the air in your lungs keeps carrying their owner above the silent world… Even old films, picked from the litter, become treasures, speaking, singing, making a dramatic narration, a fantastic story. Still, the time comes and your are losing your breath, laboring for it. This means you have to look for new mountains to climb, new cliffs. It would be good if you find it…

Photography is pitiless. By leveling out the living and the lifeless by its stillness, it brings out to consumer market (in Marxist terminology) the new product, the possibility of conscious life. It seems to me that even the civilization itself, led by the instinct of self-preservation and lost in the debris of sign systems, has been trying to return mechanic function to image. However, billions of photographers are unconsciously dominated by the idea of the value of the product that is actually given out for free, that lets discover the world's end around the nearest corner. Motionless amalgam breaks the line of extrinsic events, allowing no false variants. And what's more, it returns you back to yourself, inviting to take time and think of the next image…

I would like to offer to your attention something that I managed to capture, to preserve not just formally by the character of my profession, but reflecting the inner history, as it seemed to me, the life of waking images with their tragic, irony, sarcasm, God knows what else…

Vyacheslav Baranov