05/24: Boris Tombak - Gt ILLUSION

BORIS TOMBAK (born 1945) is an architectural photographer who studied at VGIK. For 25 years he worked at Mosproyekt, and has been a professional photographer since 1970. Tombak is the face of Russian architecture. His photographs of the works of famous masters of Soviet architecture in the post-war period have embellished almost all the official exhibitions of the Union of Architects, and have been printed in nearly all professional reviews and journals. He is known to a very broad public through the books Music in Stone (1980), Dialogues with Guidebooks (1981) Man and the City (1983), Architectural Masterpieces (1986), and Architectural Walks Around Moscow (1998). Connoisseurs are particularly appreciative of Stalinist architecture as expressed in Tombak's interpretation: the Stalin skyscrapers, the Metro, and the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievement, to which A. Tarkhanov and D. Kavtaradze devoted their book Moscow Architecture 1930 to 1950, (Academia Press, London). It is selected photographs from the AEEA series, which Tombak took over a period of 13 years, which constitute the exhibition Gt Illusion.

"The photographs of modern architecture remind one of actors' snapshots they submit for film casting. A director needs them to choose the right actor for a given role in their next film. Their main feature is applied neutrality. The same feature is demanded by clients of the architectural photographer - the architectural and design journals. With just the one difference: for a film director the creative process begins with the actors' snapshots, while for the architect the creative process of construction is ended with pictures printed in journals. Tombak never takes snapshots, but gets down to the film immediately. Grand illusion. High style. Former Utopia. The Third Rome. Broken Dreams. Exhibition of Achievement. A Film Set." ( Yu. Avvakumov.)