10/24: Oleg Smirnov - Hero_City

Oleg Smirnov (1955) - photographer. In 1981 he graduated from the Moscow Printing Institute, and has been a photographer since 1976. He has been a freelance photojournalist in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Gagauzia and Chechnya. In 1999 he was wounded. He has been a member of the Union of Artists since 1983 and the Union of Journalists since 1997. Smirnov has worked with the publishers Kniga, Iskusstvo, Molodaya Gvardia, Raduga, NLO, Voina I Mir, and Gnosis, and with the journals Na Boyevom Post, Soldat Udachi, Itogi and Stern among others.

His main works are:

Olga Berggolts, Kniga, 1985

No-one is Created for Warfare, Molodaya Gvardia,1990

The World of Soviet Man, NLO, 1994

The Caucasus Cross, Voina I Mir, 1997

Performance, NLO, 1999

New Russians and Not-so-New Russians, NLO, 2000

"It is strange to find anything in common in the behaviour of a Japanese tourist visiting, say, the ruins of Carthage and a Russian soldier on patrol in Grozniy, apart from the common background of ruins of a city destroyed. Each of them likes to pose against that background. Pictures 'as a memory' will then feature in the tourist's photo album, just as they will in our legionnaire's farewell scrapbook on finishing his call-up. Does the tourist conjure up the shade of the Roman senator Cato the Elder, whose every speech ended with a summons to sack Carthage, and does a Japanese god wake in the soldier's breast, insisting that he be photographed next to any antiquity - who knows? Carthage, in the dead language of the Phoenicians, means New Town, and it was not always ancient in its 1500 years of history. Grozniy, in its 130 years has never been on the tourist route in Chechnya. Today each of them is a hero city, both because of the way they fought, and because they are now photographed. As a rule, local residents do not feature in the photographs of either the tourist or the soldier against the backdrop of the Hero City." Yu. Avvakumov