Among various forms of relations between a person and her/his body, one is incorporated in a universal system of bodies, where it lives in separation. But we never ask ourselves why and how it happened so.

The discovery of body means the emergence of the human. Humans have never overcome the difference between body and mind, since self-knowledge is the result of this difference. Thus, if we agree with Jacques Lacan, the consciousness itself is a result of a fortuity and exists only thanks to people's eyes and ears.

Since Adam and Eve, the first emigrants of the United, learned how to perceive themselves as body, which can be understood as nothing but the recognition of what we see as what we know, skin has been the deepest instance of the human (Paul Valerie).

But what actually happened in Eden, except from the violation of the prohibition to eat the fruit of knowledge? In Baudrillard's words, a semantic culture was born as a culture of the difference between body and mind. As a result, the human face possesses the whole riches of expressiveness. The principle of visageification has become a dominant principle of decoding the meaning of bodies and landscapes in the European culture.

When Ancient Greeks understood humans as a universal measure, they referred to a concrete and material human body, which organized the world by its own example. Human body has always had something that made the outside world commensurable to humans. In other words, body is what combines the world and the human in an organic entity of the universe.

The exhibition project Landscape of Body -- Body of Landscape was designed as an experimental research into the ambivalence of landscape and body by photographic means. Our day-to-day experience includes a constant search for a safe distance between our body and other things. But body itself obtains a strange and mysterious proximity to space, which all of us had in early childhood, but lost with the acquisition of speech.

Gender landscapes of body always hide a non-erotic experience, which is not pornographic, as the movie "The Passion Empire" by Nagisa Oshima is not pornographic, with the limit of sexual closeness enriching life experience by itself. Something non-human constantly enters from the outside, which has no place in human body, but, at the same time, determines it. Uladzimir Parfianok demonstrated in his works the possibility of optical reproduction of human body, whereby body retains its aggregate state rather than becoming anything else.

The multi-prismic shooting technique allowed Parfianok to fragment body parts, for instance, a man's breast, resulting in mutation, which brought about a visual percept rather than mutilation. In the series exhibited, the 'materiality' of Parfianok 's style seems justified. The visual percept sends the viewer to a child's psychological experience of an emergence of mother's face from her breast. Visual percept is "a combination of elements of two different kinds -- manual, oral and dermal -- and the visual perception of the face, which quickly becomes the decisive factor of a child's feeding act. (G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus). What we perceive as monstrousness of optical deformations of body is just the revamping of subconscious visual percepts of the face, an attack on the face as it is and an optical criticism of its despotism, which is, at the same time, its reaffirmation.

Parfianok reaffirms an archetypal importance of the elements of body and, at the same time, the freedom of their movements in relation to the image of body. In the way of virtual rays, coming from an abyss of difference, the photographer, similarly to a child, puts glasses and prisms on and observes the refraction of the image. Similarly to an adult, he focuses the destruction of the image on the screen of our perception. In other words, we hardly see what we are shown, since it is our memories that control our vision. You may look at the images as long as you like, but that will take you nowhere, and could only damage your sight. We are facing bodies-memories, which have an impact on us and then disappear, giving way to another undefined visual percept. Face and body are yet to emerge from one another. Certain stages of this self-birth can be easily seen in techniques used by photographers to create the appearance of body. To document this process, let's turn to Mihunova's photographs again. The inanimation of male faces in two more of her photographs, as if they were cut from the dark background, is a reference to Deleuze's concept of visageite. Faces by Mihunova, which are to be body and landscape at the same time, are lifeless and bodies and landscapes have to cross this threshold of inanimation, in order to be in the same time dimensions.

Another example of that process is a photograph of a baby by Artiom Rybchinsky. The picture was purposely deformed to symbolize the baby's detachment from the world of the alive. When I looked at the photographs, I was haunted by the idea that was a doll rather than a child.

Migunova's face-without-body is somehow contradicting body-without-face in the photographs by Elena Galkina and Sergei Zhdanovich. Incidentally, many other photographers used the same technique of "cutting off" the subject's head to concentrate on her/his body. That might be explained by the artist's desire to decentralize face, making it just a part of body.

The unbalance between landscapes and bodies is obvious. It might have to do with that the photographers understood the exhibition's theme too literally and tried to make landscape recognizable as human body, which prevented them from further exploration of the subject.

Andrei Loginov's Ophelia is a symbol of the ultimate unification of body and landscape. There is something between soul and body, and this can be symbolized by water, as in Loginov's photograph. An untitled photograph by Alexander Litin displays female body that may be seen as body of Mother Earth, making it somewhat correlate with Migunova's masculine body on a pipeline. Another work by Loginov displayed at the exhibition is titled The Bather and consists of two color photographs of a woman standing in the water. The moving, ruffling water surface and the woman's lonely figure create the effect of the loneliness of human body.

Nude photographs have been long taken near the water, which somewhat justified the nakedness of the bodies. Many old photographs of that kind had an erotic or even pornographic element to them. Incidentally, mermaids and sirens have long been considered a source of temptation. Solid ground is not like that, which a landscape by Alexei Ilyin illustrates.

The higher the shooting point is, the bigger the Earth's body grows, becoming geometry of anthropomorphic landscape, as in Chernobyl Landscape by Anatol' Klyashchuk.

A group of photographers that treat body in a gentle way includes Vladimir Kozlov, whose photographs, while lacking in contrast, remind of beach photographs by Edward Weston, as well as Igor Malashchenko, who pictured a woman in the woods, where she can hardly be see among twigs, and Sergei Kaltovich, whose Dune may look like an erotic hallucination or mirage.

On the contrary, the psychedelic actualization of body in Act by Valery Savulchik can hardly be seen as an example of humanism. Color inversion expressively works with the choice of the frame to create a contrasted body, which possesses both nakedness and something concealed.

Summing up the results of the exhibition, we can say that the project brought in many "bodies" and "landscapes" that immensely differed from each other in style. The participants did not adhere to any dominant style of exposing body, basing their work on their individual styles. At the same time, several clear-cut strategies may be singled out, such as maximum intimacy with the subject, resulting in the visual derealization of body, or firm grotesque constructivism in Cindy Sherman and Joel Witkin's style, and traditional studio lyricism, as well as traditional landscape photography and visual narrations of events that united bodies and landscapes by means of fortuity and photography. But all these styles employ the creativity of human body. Beauty or ugliness of human body is secondary to the fact that body EXISTS. And photography helps us to overcome being secondary and dependence on our desire of pleasure by an image.

"How many more of these kicks lie ahead, as photographers continue to look at the body in the century to come? That's anybody's guess. How hard will these kicks be, and how many can our battered psyches take? Ask your neighborhood psychologist." With such an ironical phrase Owen Edwards finishes his article "Bodies of Work" in "American Photo" (September/October 1999, p.49). A viewer who will be absorbed in bodies and landscapes is unlikely to have anyone to pose this question to. But he will have to have some patience and understanding. The participants of the project could repeat Roland Barthes's phrase that photography has two ways and "each of us is to decide whether to submit it to a civilized code of beautiful illusions or face it as an awakening of an uncompromising reality."



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translated by Vladimir Kozlov