Sergei P. Bakanov
“ The Summer Grass, or My mother's eyes through her last 15 years ”
2020Excellence Award
ARTIST STATEMENT
The Summer Grass, or My mother's eyes through her last 15 years
Photos of my parents are my useless attempts to catch up with time.
The pictures are like a "dead space", like the dark forest of my memory.
Photos are the chaos of my soul, scattered through my bottomless archives.
I was looking for shots where my mother saw me shooting ? I wanted to find
signs of the onset of Alzheimer's disease and traces of some kind of relationship with her, leaving only her face in the pictures of different years, without making any other retouching in the frames, other than bringing them to the same format. I tried to select two or three of her hundreds of pictures each year that she might like.
Flipping through the photos of the series quickly back and forth, I see something like a movie… as if my mother is reviving, growing younger,telling me something untold.
Entries form: 32 still images
Selecting judge: Paul Graham
A simple yet profound work: the artist has photographed his mother's eyes over 15 years, as she ages and the years take their toll.
You see happiness, sadness, joy, youthful spirit, old age and strength all through a direct, single viewpoint, repeated over time.Everyone has/had a mother, so everyone will be touched by this beautifully simple body of work.
PROFILE
Sergei P. Bakanov
| 1993 | Majored in Radio Physics and Cultural Criticism at the Tomsk University |
| 2010 | Majored in Design at the Thomsk Institute of business |
He has worked as a freelance designer and photographer for many years. He is interested in photography as contemporary art and also interested in exploring the world, communicating with people, things and values through photography. He likes the process of creating unique images and recognizes that it's his style.
Some my awards
| 2007 | “Find your Tomsk” – winner |
| 2013 | “Tomsk miles” (Tomsk oblast administration) – selected |
| 2013 | “Children and Nature” – special prize |
| 2014 | “Tomsk-city inside out. Portrait without retouching” – winner. |
| Memorial award from the Union of architects of Russia. | |
| 2015 | “Veteran lives next to us” – audience award |
| 2015 | “Space Siberia” (Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Barnaul etc.) – participation |
| 2015 | “In Memory of A.Efremov. XIV” (Tyumen city) – shortlist (honorable mention) |
| 2016 | “My Motherland” – winner |
| 2016 | “In the lens of friendship – Tomsk” – 3rd place |
| 2017 | “Science and Me” – 2nd place |
| 2018 | “Ethnographic mosaic of the Tatar people” (Ministry of culture of Tatarstan, RF) – incentive prize. |
| About 20 photo contests – shortlist, special awards etc. |
2020Excellence Award