Specially for the anniversary Platonov Arts Festival, we prepared the photographic performance This Power’s Name of This Power Is Light. This is an attempt to look at Platonov’s word and the personality of Andrei Platonov through photography-thoughtfully, carefully, and without any digital tricks.
The idea’s author is Nikita Paukov, a photographer and member of the Union of Russian Photographers and the Union of Russian Journalists. Together, we explored the writer’s world, his intonation, inner silence, the tension of thought, and that special depth which makes his prose recognizable even today.
The project was created without Photoshop or AI -at its core is an «analog approach," live work with image, light, texture, and the moment. This is how not just a photograph is born, but an artistic statement where authenticity and attention to detail are especially palpable.
We asked Nikita a few questions about working on the project and how photography can help feel Platonov anew.
- Nikita, what do you think the artistic concept of the project is?
— The main idea is to present another gaze at the figure of Andrei Platonov, his personal light and his personal darkness. Each photograph is accompanied by a short quote from the writer. For the viewer, this is an opportunity to reflect on what was said and see the thought through the lens of one photograph. Besides that, I won’t hide it, I also pursued an educational goal-all the subjects were chosen deliberately. I wanted to reveal Platonov: details of his biography, the incredible diversity of his professional guises contained in the vessel of one person’s lifetime, his burning passion, his tragedy, and his infinite, uniquely recognizable, deepest understanding of humanity that completely erases the boundary between the simple and the complex.
— Which themes of Platonov’s prose did you use as a foundation?
— I can’t say that I correlated every frame I came up with to a specific work. This is a different form. Yes, the photographs are undoubtedly accompanied by quotes, but the quotes were selected not only from books-from diaries, casual notes, and essays. The connection was important not to Andrei Platonovich’s works, but to the figure of the writer, his unique formation, views on things and people, on time, on the word, on life and death, on the special and the everyday. I think it’s fair to say that each photograph references several works at once, but indirectly, tangentially.
— What is «light» in your works: a tool, an image, a symbol, a storytelling method?
— The word «photography» translates from Greek as «light» and «write." It’s impossible to separate light from photography, otherwise the photograph itself disappears. On the door of my father’s photo lab (Andrei Paukov-photographer, teacher, member of the Union of Russian Photographers-ed.), someone left an inscription: «From the darkness, from nowhere, a miracle suddenly emerges. Probably, you need to be a poet to draw with shadow and light." I saw this inscription as a child and have never forgotten it. I didn’t forget it now, when starting work on the project. But there’s something else important here. Many are used to considering Platonov’s literature heavy, complex, gloomy. For me, he has always been something light, that is, «something with light," penetrating through the lines to the reader. Therefore, light was essential here, and it was necessary to build special relations with it, where it is both a tool and a symbol, and the lead actor, simultaneously the developer and the fixer.
— How important is improvisation versus precise calculation in this genre? Does light ever «lead» the artist itself, suggesting a solution?
— That’s the only way it happens. I was interested in doing photography without deception, professing an analog approach, manual, without AI or other helpers. All subjects were meticulously thought out and calculated mentally from a technical side. But a miracle always occurred, and the image itself suggested what you hadn’t thought of. You need to look and wait; the miracle will happen right in your camera’s viewfinder, and you’ll realize that’s exactly what you really wanted. At that moment, your finger will press the button reflexively. It sounds pathos-filled, but it’s true.
— What reaction from viewers would you like these works to evoke?
— For starters-interest. That’s not so little these days. I’m only offering the viewer to look at Andrei Platonov and the world of his thoughts, which I tried to show through photography. Perhaps to reflect on the «Platonov human," burning passion, love, and time. By the way, about time. If the viewer wants to spend even a few seconds looking at these photographs and reading the corresponding quote from the writer, then it was definitely not in vain.
— How do you sense the dialogue of this experimental project with other events at the Platonov Arts Festival?
— It’s funny that you call it experimental, because it really is. There hasn’t been a format like this at Platonov before. I think it’s great that the festival is alive and growing with new forms of interaction with viewers. I’m glad to be a small part of it. As for the dialogue, this photo project undoubtedly resonates with the festival’s program and ideas, because every event (theatrical, musical, or literary) «speaks» for Platonov, about Platonov, together with him about what was important to the writer.