Video: Military Leningrad and modern Petersburg in one photo. Photographs by Sergey Larenkov
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
We are all used to seeing photographs of architectural objects - whether modern or historical - but very rarely do we see them so distinctly combined, bringing back a reality containing dusty and scratched black and white images from the past. These images captured the critical moments of one of the most incredible cities not only in Russia, but in the whole world - St. Petersburg. And their contrast with today's calm city life is impressive and terrifying.
A series of photographs by Sergei Larenkov was created to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad. The author scanned a huge number of archival images in search of the most impressive photographs of the blockade of the city during the Second World War: during this difficult time, thousands of city residents froze to death or died of hunger. Then Sergey photographed the same places and combined the images.
On the one hand, there is no difficulty in finding the boundaries between old and modern images in Larenkov's photo collages. But on the other hand, the scenes in color photographs correspond so closely to black and white, and the transitions are so smooth that it seems as if the past itself flows into the present. Especially impressive are the mounted works, where you can see the same building partially destroyed and partially restored, or collages, where pedestrians from our days walk alongside people from besieged Leningrad.
The theme of the liberation of Leningrad for Sergei Larenkov is familiar not only from textbooks: his grandparents were residents of the besieged city. And Sergei himself is not a professional photographer, but a pilot from the water area of the Neva.
More than just a one-off project, this series of photographs showcases the power of storytelling in new ways. After all, using the idea of Sergei Larenkov, one can trace the development of cities by combining “old” and “new” photographs.
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