We are please to share that Alexey Titarenko and his exhibition Alexey Titarenko: City of Shadows, on view at the State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO in St. Petersburg, have been featured on Channel One Russia. Please click here to view the segment, which includes an interview with Titarenko, an overview of the exhibition, and an interview with Titarenko’s son, the photographer Petr Titarenko.

In addition, in a recent interview for St. Petersburg Diary, Titarenko talks about the creation of the now famous series City of Shadows, in particular the crowd images created at Vasileostrovskaya metro station, the only station that connects Vasilyevsky Island to the center of the city. In 1991-1992, the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city’s transportation system was paralyzed—except for the metro. Crowds of people would make their way to the only functioning escalator. Titarenko intuitively captured the scene by opening the shutter and not closing it. In this way, he was successful in capturing, through purely photographic means, the atmosphere of chaos and devastation, as well as the emotional state he experienced at the moment. Please click here to read the interview. 

We are excited to share that the landmark retrospective exhibition Alexey Titarenko: City of Shadows opens Thursday 15 April at the renowned State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO in St. Petersburg, Russia. The exhibition is the first retrospective of the photographer’s works in St. Petersburg, marking a symbolic return of the artist’s works to the city.

As ROSPHOTO writes, “Alexey Titarenko is one of the most renowned representatives of Russian and St. Petersburg photography of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. The exhibition includes 61 photographs, executed in the unique technique of silver gelatin hand printing, inviting the audience to trace the creative journey of the artist, starting with his most popular series, made in St. Petersburg: City of Shadows (1992–1994), Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg (1995–1997), Frozen Time [Time Standing Still] (1998­–2000), and also series dedicated to other cities: Venice (2001–2014), Havana (2003, 2006), and New York (2004–2018)."

We are excited to announce that Alexey Titarenko will be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, titled City of Shadows and on view Saturday 5 September through Sunday 18 October as part of the Moscow Photobiennale. The exhibition includes over sixty photographs from the past thirty years of Titarenko's career, including work from St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York. Please click the link below to read the press release and view selected images from the show. 

We are pleased to share that Alexey Titarenko is the subject of an exhibition at Festival La Gacilly-Baden Photo in Baden, Austria, on view 14 July - 26 October 2020. The largest outdoor festival in Europe, Festival Photo La Gacilly-Baden is entering its third year and is focused on photography that explores humanistic topics and the relationship between people and their environment. On view is work from Titarenko's series Nomenklatura of Signs and from his series made in St. Petersburg from 1991-2000, during and just after the fall of the Soviet Union. The exhibition is in collaboration with Camera Obscura Gallery in Paris.

We are pleased to share that Alexey Titarenko: Nomenklatura of Signs has been featured in American Cinematographer, the online publication of the American Society of Cinematographers, in a post by John Bailey, renowned cinematographer and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Bailey writes, "This early work of Titarenko’s harks back visually to the first decade of the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union, and his montage images of found numbers and human-form cutouts starkly document the human depersonalization of what was called Homo Sovieticus... Where the optimistic and heroic images of Soviet pioneers such as Rodchenko, Shaikhet, Galadzhev, Shimansky and El Lissitzky promised a bold future, Titarenko’s Nomenklatura photographs document the cooling ashes of a burned-out, enervated Soviet Empire, with the young Titarenko as both witness and provocateur."

We live in unprecedented times, in a state of war with an invisible enemy. In such extreme situations, it is more important than ever to stay calm and united. Our exhibition Alexey Titarenko: Nomenklatura of Signs, which was scheduled to open 25 March, is now available online. The series Nomenklatura of Signs ridiculed the absurdity of Soviet life, and anticipated the collapse of both the Berlin Wall and the USSR. Titarenko’s subsequent series, City of Shadows, cast light on the deprivation and suffering that ensued. Just as those dark periods of human history passed, we know that the uncertainty and crisis that we are experiencing today will also pass. Art is essential to our life — it nourishes and elevates our souls. We are committed to continuing our work and to supporting our artists.

We are excited to announce that Alexey Titarenko's new book, Nomenklatura of Signs, is available for purchase as of March 2020.

Titarenko created the series of collages and photomontages that became Nomenklatura of Signs from 1986-1991, under the strict Soviet rule. This new publication presents the series in its entirety for the first time and includes a satirical story written by Titarenko few months before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Working in secret, Titarenko conceived the series as a way to translate the visual reality of Soviet life into a language that expressed its absurdity, in a hierarchy of symbols that, together, formed a nomenclature — or, in Russian, nomenklatura, a term for the system by which government posts were filled in the Soviet Union. Drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of Malevich, Rodchenko, and other artists of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde, Titarenko captures an uncanny, darkly comic world in which language is controlled and subverted much like the Newspeak of George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Nomenklatura of Signs includes essays by writer Jean-Jacques Marie, art historian Gabriel Bauret, and curator and art historian Ksenia Nouril. The book is designed by Kelly Doe Studio in New York and published by Damiani in Italy.

We are pleased to share that Alexey Titarenko's work will be included in the Museum of the City of New York's upcoming exhibition Collecting New York's Stories, which features highlights drawn from recent additions to the Museum’s permanent collection running the gamut from the colonial era to the recent past. A gallery of historic and contemporary photographs, opening Saturday 21 December 2019, showcases works by both well-known and emerging artists, including Bruce Davidson, Helen Levitt, Ruddy Roye, Titarenko, and others. A companion gallery, opening Wednesday 22 January 2020, presents original drawings by long-time New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg alongside artifacts that speak to the everyday life of the city.

We are pleased to announce that the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, has acquired a selection of prints from Titarenko’s Havana series for its permanent collection. The Harn is one of the largest university art museums in the South, with a permanent collection of more than 11,300 objects from Asian, African, modern and contemporary art, as well as photography.

"In 'Museum on the Edge,' a retrospective of [Nakhova's] work at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of unofficial Soviet art, Nakhova’s pioneering apartment installations are represented only through photographic documentation. The focus of the show is her subsequent work, from the post-Soviet period, which deals with art history and the workings of the museum as an institution intended to house great art. The painting Vanitas 1 (2017) is a copy of Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Woman (ca. 1650–55), with Nakhova’s face, ghostly white and with eyes closed, painted over the composition, blocking out everything but the old woman’s head and right hand. The work is a rumination on death, namely the death of the artist, and on the immortality afforded through art...In The Battle of Invalids, as in her other best works, Nakhova taps into universal truths about the human condition."

We are pleased to share that Irina Nakhova's installation Room 4, originally created in her apartment in Moscow in the 1980s, is on view now through Sunday 24 November at the Tate Modern in London as part of their ongoing display Performer and Participant. Click here to watch an interview with Nakhova at the Tate about Room 2.

The Tate writes, "First created in 1984, Room 2 was a result of her [Nakhova's] frustration from the oppressive Soviet Regime. The Soviet state only permitted artists working in the prominent ‘socialist realist style’ to practice. As an ‘unofficial’ artist, Irina used accessible materials to make art at home. Using black, white and grey paper, she confused those who stepped into the space. Room 2 became a space for artistic debate for the tight-knit community of Moscow conceptualist artists."

We are pleased to announce that a total installation by gallery artist Irina Nakhova is on view in the exhibition There Is a Beginning at the End: the Secret Tintoretto Fraternity, at the San Fantin church, Venice. The exhibition coincides with the Venice Biennale and honors the Italian Renaissance painter, Tintoretto. Also on view in the exhibition is Tintoretto’s Minerva Sending Away Mars from Peace and Prosperity (1576-77) and video installations by Dmitry Krylov and Gary Hill, among others. The exhibition runs through September 11, 2019. You can find more information at this link.

Alexey Titarenko’s photographs will be on display at the Festival La Gacilly Photo in the Jardin du Relais Postal in Brittany, France. Photographs taken in the 1990s in Saint Petersburg, as well as from his Nomenclatura of Signs series will be shown. The exhibition opens Friday June 7th. Click here to visit the festival’s website.

We are delighted that an installation, comprising found photographs and ephemera, by gallery artist Marcia Lippman is on view at ArtYard Gallery's The Past is Prologue: Vernacular Photography, Pop Photographica and the Road to Selfie Culture (Frenchtown, NJ). The installation, titled Mother, Myself, expresses the artist's life-long search for her biological mother and the ephemeral nature of memory. The exhibition runs until July 28th, 2019. 

On March 30, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey; opened the exhibition Irina Nakhova: Museum on the Edge, Irina Nakhova's first retrospective museum exhibition in the United States. On display are Nakhova's paintings from the late 1970s, documentation of her total installations created in the 1980s, and recent paintings and interactive installations. The exhibition is on view until October 13, 2019. 

Pentti Sammallahti recently released his newest monograph, Des Oiseaux (Xavier Barral, 2018). Fascinated by the idea of flight and exploration, Des Oiseaux focuses on the theme of birds. Critic Francesco Zanot comments, “the photographer looks at birds with tenderness and curiosity, a gaze which underlies fantasy and a “surrealistic” approach.” The book can be purchased here, for € 35.00.

Denis Brihat newest monograph, Les Métamorphoses de l’argentique (Le Bec en l’air, 2018),  includes photographs of nature spanning the artist’s near 60-year career. The book also coincides with Brihat’s 90th birthday, which the artist celebrated last spring. Les Métamorphoses de l'argentique can be ordered here.

Alexey Titarenko’s Store 59, 1994, from the series, “City of Shadows” was featured in the November edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. The photograph was used to illustrate the article, “Le visage antisocial de Vladimir Poutine: brutale reforme des retraites en Russie” (The anti-worker face of Vladimir Putin: brutal reform in Russia.)

Poet August Kleinzahler writes about George Tice's photographs: "William Carlos Williams, inevitably, comes up in discussions of Tice, being, in his own work, very much rooted in New Jersey, particularly East Rutherford and Paterson. When Manhattan does make an appearance, the great metropolis is usually viewed across the Hudson River from the Jersey side. The two artists also work the same patch aesthetically. They are both keen on documentary, getting it down, the truth of it, without adornment. Both men are interested in the vernacular, in the larger sense of the terrm and in the lives and habitats of working men and women: architecture, speech, subject matter. Some might characterise them as fetishizing the ordinary. As someone from that neighborhood, I'd say that they are after what claims their attention most vividly, what's in front of them, staring back at them."

We are delighted that MAST Foundation, Bologna, Italy; has recently acquired a selection of Alexey Titarenko’s photographs from the series, City of Shadows. Titarenko’s artwork will be exhibited in their upcoming show, Pendulum: Moving Goods, Moving People. Organized on the occasion of MAST's fifth anniversary, Pendulum showcases photographs from across the foundation's permanent collection. The exhibition is on view October 4 - January 13.

"Rhoney is obsessed with luminosity. With a photographer’s eye for the split-second and a painter’s gift for suggesting the eternal, Rhoney transmutes her gelatin silver photographs into scenes we don’t so much see in real life as conjure from our memories. With the lightest touch of transparent oil paints applied to B&W prints captured from the 1970’s to the present, Rhoney’s delightful inventiveness evokes what your mind’s eye dreams in those rare moments when the world glows around you."

Alexey Titarenko is a part of The Short Story of Photography (2018: Laurence King Publishing) edited by Haydyn Smith. The book is a new and innovative introduction to the subject of photography. Simply constructed, it explores 50 key photographs from the first experiments in the early ninteenth century to digital photography. Accessible and concise, the book explains how, why and when certain photographs really have changed the world. It demystifies technical jargon, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of photography since its creation. Smith highlights Titarenko’s experimentation with long exposure, as exemplified in the 1992 Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station (Crowd 1). In this photograph, long exposure transforms the human figures entering the subway into ghostly shadows to express anxieties of 1990s Saint Petersburg.

Nicholas Hughes’s 2017 monograph Nowhere Far (GOST books) received glowing reviews in the online photography publication Feature Shoot. Hughes’s book has been fifteen years in the making and compiles his hand-printed photographs of land, sea, and atmosphere — both near and far from his home in North Wales. In the review, Ellyn Kail says about Hughes’s choice of title," His words, like his photographs, lure us into a state of false understanding. We recognize the trees, the sun, the moon, the clouds, but it’s whatever lies beyond them that drags us back for another look."

Alexey Titarenko was recently included in a list of the world’s 52 most influential street photographers. The list was put together by the popular Vancouver photography website “Streets I Have Walked.” Included in the list are photographers past and present who have shaped street photography historically, technically, or artistically. The list is regularly edited based on changing tastes and is open to suggestions from the public.

Collector Loring Knoblauch reviewed the gallery's current exhibition, Boris Ignatovich: Master of Russian Avant-Garde Photography: "The consistency of Ignatovich’s innovative visual language is what stands out here. He repeatedly turned the ordinary into something infused with the momentum of a fresh perspective, and while the long arm of history has dismantled the tenets of the societal framework he was working within, his images remain rich in their embodiment of that enthusiastic vantage point. This understated show is a solid art historical gap filler, putting the underknown Ignatovich in his rightful place in the Constructivist pantheon."

A selection of Alexey Titarenko’s photographs are included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Baltimore Art Museum; and the Denver Art Museum.  His photographs was also exhibited in The Soviet Century: 100 Years of the Russian Revolution, at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, on view from September 5 - December 10, 2017, and in Commemorating the Russian Revolution, at the Zimmerli Art Museum, on view from October 14, 2017 - February 18, 2018. 

Nicholas Hughes’s recently published monograph Nowhere Far is receiving a wonderful response, including an article in The Guardian last month. Nowhere Far reflects Hughes concern for humanity’s relationship with nature — how humans both destroy and find inspiration from their natural surroundings. The Guardian writes about In Darkness Visible (Verse I), no 14 (2007), “while reflecting on man’s folly in images of great turbulence and destruction, he also provides hope that the Earth will heal itself.”

Nailya Alexander is participating in Paris Photo 2017 at Stand A30. The fair unites 190 exhibitors and thousands of photographs from around the world. This year, Nailya Alexander is showing a selection from the current exhibition Russian Photography After the Revolution, as well as photographs by contemporary Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko. The regular Manhattan gallery location will remain open during the fair, which takes place from November 9th through the 12th at the Grand Palais.

The New York Times recently selected the Nailya Alexander Gallery’s current exhibition Russian Photography After the Revolution as one of four shows to see in New York. In commemoration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution, the exhibition highlights the rich experimentation by Soviet photographers during the 1920s and 1930s. Included in the exhibition are such Soviet masters as Alexander Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, and Arkady Shaikhet.

New York Times critic Jason Farago wrote: “We all know what became of the Russian Revolution, and how the avant-garde vision of the 1920s and ’30s was crushed in the vise of Zhdanovite propaganda. But to believe in the future as these photographers did — to have an artistic vocation greater than narcissistic individualism or ceaseless critique — appears more enviable than pitiable in a new century of downscaled dreams.”

We are pleased to announce that this season the Museum of the City of New York has acquired a selection of photographs by contemporary Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko. The photographs are part of Titarenko’s New York series, shot between 2004 and 2017. 

In 2015 Museum of the City of New York Curator of Prints and Photographs Sean Corcoran wrote of the series: "For Titarenko, each city and its people dictate the image he creates. His images reflect his attempt to reach a deeper understanding of place through the effects of history. It should not be surprising, then, that Titarenko’s vision of New York resonates with the work of Alvin Langdon Coburn and Alfred Stieglitz — men who strived to embody the dynamism of the city and its people in photographs at the turn of the twentieth century. As Titarenko’s relationship with New York grows and changes, so too will the photographs he creates."

Pentti Sammallahti is currently the subject of a retrospective at Stimultania Pôle de photographie in Strasbourg, France, on view through 26 November 2017. The exhibition, titled Ici au loin (Here Far Away) after his acclaimed monograph of the same name, covers over four decades of the photographer's work in dozens of countries around the world.

In its October 4 review, L'Oeil de la Photographie writes, "A gleaner of landscapes wild, transformed, unusual—Pentti Sammallahti reveals a fragile universe that is harmoniously composed. In a monochromatic treatment and with the same artistic strength, the horizons of the Baltic Sea, South Africa, and Namibia blend together...The finesse of this Finnish photographer’s execution, his printing technicality, and his personal poetry combine in intense frescos of bucolic landscapes where humans and objects lose themselves in this abundant, surreal, and melancholic nature."

On Thursday, September 14 from 6:30-8:00 PM, in conjunction with the exhibition Red Horizon, Alexey Titarenko will join a panel of artists, art historians, and curators at the Columbus Museum of Art to discuss the politics of cultural production in the USSR during the 20th century and the continued relevancy of the art of dissent today. In addition to Titarenko, participants include the artist Vitaly Komar; Natalia Sidlina, curator or Russian art at Tate Modern in London; and Christina Kiaer, Assosiate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. This program is free and open to all.

This beautiful limited-edition monograph from gallery artist Nicholas Hughes is now available to pre-order. Nowhere Far will include work from six series produced over the past fifteen years, as well as a foreword by Brett Rogers, director of the The Photographers' Gallery, London; an essay by Martin Barnes, senior curator of Photography at the V&A Museum; and an essay by novelist Jay Griffiths. Visit the Kickstarter at the link below to pre-order your copy between now and Wednesday 9 August.

"Nailya Alexander Gallery’s midsummer show is humming with heat and tranquility. The photographs, mostly black-and-white, work beautifully together, balancing soporific gray hues and high contrast lighting to achieve a feeling of otherworldliness. The works are as much about quiet seclusion as they are about the mental transcendence it allows for...The show’s seven photographers are connected by their distinctive artistic processes, which extend beyond conventional shooting and printing. Alexey Titarenko, George Tice, Pentti Sammallahti, and Sumner Wells Hatch are masterful dark room printers who employ unusual printing techniques to alter color and light while developing their own work."

We are pleased to invite you to view Lori Grinker's work as part of the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, on view now through 22 October at the Museum of the City of New York. This groundbreaking exhibition, curated by Stephen Vider, sheds new light on the response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York City, and examines how artists and activists reshaped ideas of family and domestic life.

Alexey Titarenko: The City is a Novel opened last night at Spazio Damiani in Bologna, Italy, which was inaugurated in June 2016 as a new facet of the renowned publishing company Damiani editore.

The exhibition, on view through 15 September, features gelatin-silver prints, printed by the artist, from throughout his three-decade career in Venice, New York, and his native St. Petersburg. The City is a Novel is also the title of Titarenko's monograph, published by Damiani in 2015 and available for sale both through the publisher and through Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York.

Please join us on Saturday, April 29 for the Madison Avenue Gallery Walk, a chance to visit the many galleries located on Madison Avenue and its adjacent side streets from East 57th up to East 86th Street. Held on the Saturday preceding Frieze New York and the TEFAF New York fairs, the Madison Avenue Gallery Walk features over sixy curator and artist talks at participating galleries. 

We will be hosting a talk at 4:00 PM with art historian Dmitry Kiyan, who will discuss Alexey Titarenko's career and the work in our current show, Alexey Titarenko: The City is a Novel. The event is free and open to the public.

Please visit the website of Studio International to read a new interview with Titarenko and art historian Natasha Kurchanova, in which he discusses his life in the Soviet Union, his early photographic experiments, the writers and filmmakers who have influenced his work, and more.

"When I was a boy, I walked along the city streets, and some things around me – such as buildings, their architectural details and smells – elicited feelings of delight, euphoria, emotional excitement and inspiration. They were responsible for creating a special state in my soul...When I was given a camera at eight years of age, I said to myself that it was precisely the kind of instrument I could use to help me preserve these fleeting moments of the condition of my soul. I could make them last longer, and return to them over and over again. I took my camera and went to after-school photography classes for children at the Kirov Palace of Culture on Vasilyevsky Island, St Petersburg and, little by little, I learned to use it."

We are pleased to announce that we will be participating this year for the first time in the PGH Photo Fair, now in its fifth edition, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The fair will be held April 29-30, 2017 in the Hall of Sculpture, and will host thirteen internationally renowned photography dealers and projects whose work spans the history of the medium, from nineteenth-century vintage prints to contemporary photography and photobooks.

We are excited to be participating in the 37th edition of The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, taking place from March 30 through April 2 at Pier 94 in New York. Nailya Alexander Gallery will be exhibiting in Booth 706. We will be featuring rare, large-scale photographs by Boris Ignatovich (1899-1976) and Arkady Shaikhet (1898-1959), many of which have never before been exhibited. Also on view in our booth will be work by Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962, St. Petersburg), Pentti Sammallahti (b. 1950, Helsinki), Denis Brihat (b. 1928, Paris), and Marcia Lippman.

Alexey Titarenko: The City is a Novel will be open by appointment for the duration of AIPAD.

Writer, curator, and critic Lyle Rexer reviews Painting: Photographs by Marcia Lippman in the January/February issue of photograph:

"This surprising exhibition from Marcia Lippman, on view at Nailya Alexander Gallery through March 2, is not what it first appears to be. Or rather, its obvious pleasures are not to be enjoyed without some chastening...Lippman’s photographs hold open the process that time itself would seal up, to show us the work of time on pigments, oils, and canvas. This process contests the painters’ gestures – more visible through Lippman’s intervention. In seeming to submit to painting, these photographs triumph over it."

Collector, curator, and photography consultant W. H. Hunt reviews our current exhibition Painting: Photographs by Marcia Lippman, on view through March 2:

"You won’t be confused that these are paintings; these are deceptively simple and beautiful color photographs...The works in the exhibition are exquisite. It is so rare to be offered the pleasure of looking. Lippman brings a keen focus to her color and her subject matter, honing in on a collar, a hem, the edge of a frame. The work is very quiet. The palette is luxe and artful, pastels and silvers and deep blacks and brilliant whites."

Photographs by Hallie Neely from the opening reception for Painting: Photographs by Marcia Lippman, on view through Thursday, March 2, are featured in Musée Magazine.

"In Russia, all the animals are free – horses, dogs and cats, all of them walking everywhere. I was living in the only small guesthouse on the island, and one morning I was having breakfast and looked up to see a dog walking along, carrying a bag. I was told that the dog was owned by a lonely, legless man, who dispatched it every morning to the only shop on the island. In the bag was a shopping list, and the dog walked some kilometres to the shop, gave the bag to the saleswoman, who put the groceries in the bag, and the dog went back with it. Usually, I heard, the list was just bread and vodka."

"But the strongest gravitational centers of the sprawling exhibition are the works by Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, the artist duo Komar and Melamid, and the group Collective Actions...Unlike Kabakov’s discursive installation crowded with dozens of imaginary voices, “Room No. 3” by Irina Nakhova swaddles the viewer in darkness and solitude. A small room of roughly 13 by 13 by 8 feet contains a single window, a balcony door, an easel, and a desk; every object and surface in it is painted dark gray, and the only light source is a desk lamp, which throws a narrow cone of light on the blind window. The piece is one in a series of installations created by Nakhova in her Moscow apartment between 1983 and 1987; each of these works transport the viewer from the dreariness of the Soviet standardized, collectivized existence into a private, dreamlike world."

Alexey Titarenko will be holding a lecture, Q&A, and book signing at Soho Photo on Thursday, December 8 from 6:00-7:30 PM. Titarenko will be discussing his series City of Shadows, and will be selling and signing copies of his sold-out monograph The City is a Novel (Damiani, 2015). The event is free and open to the public.

Works by Pentti Sammallahti and Nicholas Hughes will be on view this Friday, November 18 through Sunday, January 15 at The Photographers' Gallery in London. The exhibition When frost was spectre-grey takes its name from the poem The Darkling Thrush (1899) by Thomas Hardy, and also features work by photographers Evgenia Arbugaeva, Tamas Dezso, Paul Hart, Martina Lindqvist, and Simon Roberts. Shown at right: Pentti Sammallahti, Finland, 2016. 

We are pleased to announce that Alexey Titarenko will be signing copies of his monograph The City is a Novel (Damiani, 2015) at this year's edition of Paris Photo, the 20th anniversary of the fair. The book signing will take place on Friday, November 11 at 6:00 PM in Damiani's booth, H9.

The City is a Novel is the first major publication devoted to Titarenko's thirty-year career, and features over 140 photographs of Titarenko's work in St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York. The monograph also includes essays by curator, writer, and art historian Gabriel Bauret; Brett Abbott, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art; and Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, as well as an autobiographical essay by Titarenko himself. The book was selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best photobooks of 2015.

William Meyers: Civics is on view through Tuesday, November 1, 2016. Pictured at right: Listening to the candidate, Rego Park, Queens, August 25, 2011.

Humanism + Dynamite = The Soviet Photomontages of Aleksandr Zhitomirsky, the first exhibition in the post-Soviet world devoted to leading Soviet artist Aleksandr Zhitomirsky, is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. This show offers a captivating portrayal of a satirist and loyal citizen who inventively furthered his country’s official causes across a tumultuous half-century—from the Depression era and World War II through the decades of colonial liberation in Africa and Asia, civil rights in America, and even international crises over oil and dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Over 100 works—all drawn from the Ne boltai! Collection—provide an overview of Zhitomirsky’s career and methods in photomontage.

We are excited to announce that Irina Nakhova has been selected as one of the world's top 25 Most Collectible Conceptual Artists in the September issue of Art & Auction. The feature concides with the opening of our fall exhibition, Irina Nakhova: Presence, on view through October 1. Presence features two new paintings by Nakhova, completed this summer, as well as important pieces like Mobius (1990) and Primary Colors 2 (2003), the latter of which was an inspiration for one of the rooms in the pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Published today on the blog of cinematographer and director John Bailey, ASC: "Denis Brihat's Humble Onions," a thoughtful overview of Brihat's life and career and an investigation of a question that has dogged many a student of Brihat's remarkable œuvre: why onions?  

Bailey writes, "What distinguishes Brihat’s studies from Weston’s is not the level of craftsmanship of the print  — they are comparable — but the sense of “aliveness” in Brihat’s work. You can almost feel his subjects pulsating as they “pose,” whereas Weston’s still lives of vegetables or fruit appear lifeless, justifying the French expressionnatures mortes...The onion we eat is only a small part of its being: the root, the only part we tend to see in our deracinated experience of sorting through onions in the supermarket bins. What Brihat photographs is the whole onion, pulled from the soil with root tendrils and dirt still attached, and onions that are left to dry as new growth breaks through the bulb, reminding us that even in its d(r)ying state, it is vibrantly alive."

Now on view at the St. Petersburg Manege: Irina Nakhova's Pilot, from her solo show in the Russian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Nakhova's work can be seen alongside that of Russian artists Oleg Kulik, Yuri Avvakumov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Timur Novikov, Andrei Barteniev, Pavel Paperstein, and Dmitri Gutov, among many others, as part of the exhibition Russian Artists: Participants in the Venice Biennale.

Alexey Titarenko is the subject of this month's Photographer Spotlight in the Los Angeles Review of Books.  

Producer Michael Kurcfeld writes, "If Titarenko’s art is germinated by, as he says, 'moments of moral and physical euphoria,' even while reflecting the arc of oppression in Russia, his images paint a ghostly world inhabited by spirits rather than corporeal beings. He uses a kind of blur distortion that makes one think of Francis Bacon at his most hallucinatory — more a psychological landscape than a concrete one. In his St. Petersburg, life is seen as energy, as flux, though embodied in men and women bent with fatigue and, sometimes, despair...These moods appear in the subterfuge of lights and shadows from which he refashions them, each image in fact uniquely handmade in the darkroom, never precisely replicated."

Vince Aletti writes of Sammallahti's work in the exhibition "Another North: Landscape Reimagined," on view through 6 August at Scandinavia House: "In Pentti Sammallahti’s intimate black-and-white photographs, the Finnish countryside becomes a fairy-tale backdrop for characters including a frog and a white rabbit."

We invite you to see work by Alexander (Lev) Borodulin in the Brooklyn Museum's upcoming exhibition "Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present." The exhibition is on view from July 15, 2016 through January 8, 2017. Borodulin's work will be displayed alongside that of Richard Avedon, Rineke Dijkstra, Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Alexander Rodchenko, and Andy Warhol, among other artists.

Lev Borodulin was born in Moscow in 1923 and began studying photography in the 1950s, after serving in World War II. He worked for over a decade as a press photographer for the magazine Ogonyok, where he made strides to define photography as not only a documentary medium, but also an art form. His images of divers, runners, fencers, rowers, boxers, footballers, swimmers, and athletes of all kinds are widely viewed as some of the most important sporting photographs of the twentieth century.

We are pleased to announce that photographer Jane Hilton will be included in the exhibition Scarlet Muse: Photography and Prostitution, opening Thursday 9 June at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York. Photographs from Hilton's acclaimed series Precious will be shown alongside the work of Eugène Atget, E. J. Bellocq, Brassaï, Larry Clark, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Danny Lyon, among others. The exhibition is on view through 22 July.

Nailya Alexander Gallery and Photo London are pleased to present a special screening of Alexey Titarenko: Art et la Manière, a documentary by Rebecca Houzel about Russian-born photographer Alexey Titarenko, produced by Image & Compagnie for the French-German TV network ARTE. The film will be shown in the screening room at Somerset House on Saturday 21 May from 4-5 PM, and will be followed by a Q&A with Titarenko and Jim Casper, director of LensCulture.

At 5.15 pm, following the Q&A, Titarenko will be signing copies of his new monograph, The City is a Novel, published by Damiani and recently selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of their best photobooks of 2015. The signing will take place in Fernandez & Wells in the East Wing of Somerset House.

Alexey Titarenko is the subject of the first episode of filmmaker Ted Forbes' new documentary series. Click the link below to watch on Youtube. 

“On that first visit, I couldn’t believe the poster targets. They were extraordinary, non-PC targets, all beautifully done – characters that looked like Muslims, a thuggish-type burglar, a man with a hostage. All the people that go choose what they want to shoot at….To me it was a bigger statement to interview the shooters, take away the targets that they’d shot at, and bring them back to London and photograph them. I felt it was a more interesting comment on American gun culture to see what damage it can do to a body than any photo of a man and a kid holding a gun."

"At a fair like this, the best moments usually come from an unexpected discovery. The grouping of landscapes by the prodigiously gifted Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti, which are exhibited by Nailya Alexander, are distillations of mood and mist. In the spirit of André Kertész, Mr. Sammallahti’s photographs manage to be lyrical without dissolving into sentimentality. They left me wanting more."

Please join us at the AIPAD Photography Show in Booth 117 at the Park Ave Armory, New York, from Thursday, April 14 through Sunday, April 17, 2016. We will be featuring photographs by Denis Brihat, George Tice, Alexey Titarenko, Annemarie Heinrich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Pentti Sammallahti.

We invite you to visit our booth on Saturday, April 16 from 3:00-5:00 PM for a book signing with Alexey Titarenko. Titarenko will be signing copies of his new monograph The City is a Novel, published in Italy by Damiani editore and selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best photobooks of 2015.

"Their first meeting was in 1959, when, for professional reasons, Denis Brihat had contacted Labonicol, the photo lab founded by Claudine and Jean-Pierre Sudre. They hit it off straight away: Claudine, Jean-Pierre and Denis. In photography, their paths criss-crossed until the deaths, first, of Jean-Pierre, then Claudine...They meet again in 2016, showing in New York in the same building, Jean-Pierre Sudre at Tom Gittermann Gallery, Denis Brihat at Nailya Alexander Gallery, almost 50 years after their first joint exhibition, with Pierre Cordier, in NY at MoMA at the invitation of John Szarkowski."

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as the old adage proclaims, but in the case of fine art photographer Denis Brihat, beauty is in the eye of anybody who choose to share, however momentarily, his unique perspective on the world around him. Over the course of his 70 year career, Denis Brihat developed his own format – that of the ‘photographic painting’ – through which he created a nuanced and dedicated series of images of the under-loved and the overlooked in everyday life – whether that be the cracked, peeling skin of an ordinary shallot or the delicate petals of a common poppy."

Curator, writer, and art historian Gabriel Bauret writes, "Titarenko’s photography does not reduce itself to the mere capturing of an instant. While printing in the darkroom, he combines different sources of light and selectively tones his prints to achieve subtle nuances of color. Also important to note that the work done in the lab  is never twice the same: each print is as unique as the shot...If a city is the privileged territory of a novel, even with a relatively autobiographical dimension, the city can also be an inspiration for artistic expression. Alexey Titarenko has combined the two approaches."

"Heinrich began her career as an apprentice to European émigré photographers. In 1930, at the age of eighteen, she set up her first studio in Buenos Aires. Surrounded by artists of every discipline – celebrities, film and radio stars, opera singers, ballerinas, tango dancers, and writers – Heinrich was central to the development and popularization of a new kind of photograph: the celebrity portrait...Heinrich’s work as a celebrity portraitist and professional photographer is supplemented by an extraordinary series, Desnudos (Nudes), which she began as early as 1934. Heinrich’s nudes demonstrate not only her thoroughly modern understanding of the female form, but also her technical mastery and attention to light. Rarely exhibited during her lifetime, these photographs are all the more remarkable for having been produced in almost total isolation from emerging trends in nude photography in Europe."

William Meyers writes, "Annemarie Heinrich (1912-2005) was born in Germany, moved to Argentina in 1926, and early on was among the country’s artistic and entertainment celebrities. Alexander will be showing Heinrich’s imaginative portraits of beauties Beba Bidart, Florence Marly and Eliza Christian Galve—the first doubled, the second with a distorted reflection, and the third partially obscured. There are also portraits of cultural figures Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and Marian Anderson; dancers Anthony Tudor and Serge Lifar; and seven female nudes distinguished by their modernist composition and theatrical lighting."

William Meyers writes, "Mr. Titarenko’s pictures of St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York are not about the buildings, streets and parks of those cities per se, but about them as sites of narrative. In most of these images one feels the setting is a place where something has happened, or is happening, or is going to happen; there is a theatricality about them. The technical device Mr. Titarenko uses to achieve this effect is the long exposure, keeping the lens open so that moving figures are blurred, sometimes appearing almost as wraiths. He is also a brilliant printer, able to control the tonal values in his prints to emphasize and deemphasize particular elements. In an affecting autobiographical essay he tells how reading Dostoevsky and listening to Shostakovich freed him from the Soviet mindset to become truly creative."