20/24: Katia Golitsyna - sideSTREET

Katya Golitsyn was born in Moscow in 1964, and is an artist. She graduated from the Faculty of Book Illustration in the Moscow Institute of Printing, and is a member of the Russian Union of Photographic Artists.

Among more than 30 group and personal exhibitions are the following: Third Day of the Third Moon, Manezh Gallery (2002), Portrait of a Saxophone, Photosoyuz Gallery (2001), Mohicans of the Roads, Paris Cafe , Moscow Arts Centre (2000), Citroen Territory, New Collection Gallery (2000).

“If architectural photography can be compared with portrait photography, then what is the photography of streets and lanes? Everyday genre? At all events, the presence in the frame of faces or the faces of houses is extremely important for recognising architecture, since we can’t recognise it by verbal descriptions (this is police practice), but only from a familiar physiognomy, like an old acquaintance.

Visitors gather together at stations and depart to the underground, while locals meet each other in the lanes. Although in the modern dictionary of Russian town planning such planning units don’t exist. Lanes are no longer being planned, but planning still goes on in the lanes. Thoroughfares are planned, but on passing through them, you don’t remember anything in particular. A lane can remain in one’s memory from walking through it and the meetings one had while doing so. And we recognise those lanes in which we have spent time and on the faces of whose houses we have looked. Katya Golytsina both remembers and loves anyone and everyone, and perhaps for this reason uses memory rather than photographic technique; complicated manual retouching as a supplementary tactile experience, when it seems there isn’t enough light to take a photograph. Indeed, there is little light in Moscow, but more than 100,000 houses.” (Yu. Avvakumov).