ATLAS GALLERY

49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF

T. 020 7224 4192  E. info@atlasgallery.com

For immediate release, August 2007

LEV BORODULIN

RUSSIA’S GREATEST LIVING PHOTOGRAPHER

“THE LION OF SOVIET PHOTOGRAPHY”

8TH NOVEMBER – 1ST DECEMBER

The Atlas Gallery is proud to announce the first ever exhibition in the U.K. of the work of the celebrated Russian photographer, Lev Borodulin. Born in 1923 and now living in Israel, Borodulin’s career in photography mirrors that of many established masters of American and European photography. As the star photographer of “Ogonyok”, the most important illustrated magazine in Russia during the 40’s and 50’s, Borodulin almost single-handedly defined the style of post-war Russian magazine photography.

Significantly, Borodulin’s formative years as a photographer were possibly the toughest in the country’s history and certainly in the history of Soviet photography. It is easy to forget that these years are still within such recent living memory, perhaps due to the fact that there were so few photographers who documented daily life during this period, and because of the heavy restrictions imposed on them by the authorities. There are therefore very few photographic images to turn to from which we can form an impression. Our mental image of life in Soviet Russia during the 40’s and 50’s is not nearly so richly informed as our image of the same photographically-saturated period of American culture for example. Borodulin’s photographs give a fascinating insight into this time, not in the socially aware style of the western “Concerned Photographer”, but through his formalist approach to the ideologically free medium of sports photography.

The exhibition focuses almost exclusively on images of sport, participants and competitors, parades and the Olympics; an arena where the photographer was free from state control, during a time when one of the most established photography movements in the world came under the heel of the authorities. The criticism of formalism in the 30’s, the battle with cosmopolitanism and the official state anti-semitism of the 40’s led to the modernist movement being erased from the history of Soviet Art, leaving many of the most prominent figures of Soviet photography unemployed or interned. The photographer’s profession was deemed “unnecessary”, as was the system of photo-education; and this lead to the closure of the best photography publications. Thus, no more an art, photography became a tool for propaganda.

It is all the more impressive that Borodulin’s work still endures and his vision is so striking at a time when the photographer came under such stringent control. Even his photograph of an Olympic diver was criticised for its depiction of the diver’s rear from behind in mid-dive. It was a minor victory for the magazine that the image was eventually successfully printed as a cover, later to become famously celebrated as “The Flying Ass”. Thus, in sports photography, Borodulin found himself free to resurrect the formalist principles of the great photographers of the 20’s and 30’s. In recent years Borodulin’s “Parade” was chosen by Bill Clinton as one of the photographs which hung in the Oval Office. In contrast to the exuberant, almost louche style and glamour of much 40’s and 50’s photography from the west, Borodulin’s work ultimately celebrates the victory of the individual over the system. On a more direct level his images of divers, runners, fencers, rowers, boxers, footballers, swimmers and athletes of all kinds are some of the most important sporting photographs of the twentieth century.

More information and images: Atlas Gallery on 020 7224 4192 or robin@atlasgallery.com