Selected aRTICLES
Black & White, October 2023
Spaghettimag, February 2023
Kommersant, October 2020
Studio International, April 2017
The Wall Street 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
“Artist of Petersburg: Interview with Alexey Titarenko,” Menu Magazine, 2010
Black & White Photography Magazine, United Kingdom, June 2010
ARTnews, April 2010
The Wall Street Journal, March 2010
Revue des modes N14, spring/summer 2009 (French)
Revue des modes N14, spring/summer 2009 (English)
The New York Sun, April 24, 2008
The New Yorker, April 7, 2008
Hemispheres Magazine, April 2008
The Irish Times, May 2007
Art in America, June/July 2006
The New York Times, March 2006
The New York Sun, March 2006
The New Yorker, March 2006
The New Yorker, February 2006
Shots, interview with Russell Joslin, 2005
Photomagazin, Moscow, March 2005
The Moscow Times, April 2004
Houston Chronicle, March 2004
Landscape, Photographs of Time and Space, Ferdinand Protzman
The New York Times, October 2003
Beaux Arts Magazine, France, February 2003
Liberation, France, July 2002
Los Angeles Times, August 2001
Selected Essays
Alexey Titarenko and the City as Novel
Michael Kurcfeld, Los Angeles Review of Books
Alexey Titarenko: Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg
Georgy Golenky, art critic, member of the Russian Union of Artists, and Head of the Department of New Trends in Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum
Translated by John Nicolson
French version translated by Nathalie Bessis-Dernov
Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko
John Bailey, A.S.C., director and cinematographer
Street-Wise: The Photography of Garry Winogrand and Alexey Titarenko
John Bailey, A.S.C., director and cinematographer
Fall Symposium Retraces Contours of History: 'City of Shadows' Exhibition Exposes Surreal Scenes of St. Petersburg's Past
Sadie Hoaglund, Middlebury College
Alexey Titarenko: The City of Moist Silver
Irina Tchmyreva, senior researcher of photography, State Research Institute of Art History, Russian Academy of Fine Arts
Titarenko, the Magician of St. Petersburg
Gabriel Bauret, curator, writer, and art historian
Selected Quotations from the Press
"Mr. Titarenko 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, The 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 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 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 façades: 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
"[In] 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 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 at Apex Fine Art are stills that have the presence of short films. 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. Dostoyevsky, 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 paintings 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...it is their contradictory mixture of vagueness and precision that makes [these images] exceptional." Aiden Dunne, The Irish Times