A meeting with photographers from the creative workshop "ArGentum" will take place in the "DUKHOSKI KRUGLIK" exhibition hall.

Without the past, there is no future: all that is most harmonious and beautiful, created by human hands, rests on traditions. This is the undisputed conviction of the photographers from the Vitebsk creative workshop "ArGentum".

Without the past, there is no future: all that is most harmonious and beautiful, created by human hands, rests on traditions. This is the undisputed conviction of the photographers from the Vitebsk creative workshop "ArGentum". And it is difficult not to agree with them, looking at their author's photographic works, made in compliance with all the technologies and recipes of photographic art of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries.

On January 30, at 4:30 PM, a meeting with Ekaterina GRINEVSKAYA and Vladislav ANDREEV – photographers of the "ArGentum" creative workshop – will take place in the "DUKHOVSKOY KRUGLIK" exhibition hall.

The artists have consciously abandoned the use of "digital" in their work and have preferred manual photography using last century's technology, with its photographic art techniques and recipes, to numerous computer special effects, when the very effect of capturing an image on paper was considered almost a miracle. The Vitebsk masters use a wooden FKD camera (the very one from which, as we are promised, a bird should fly out), black-and-white film, and homemade photo plates. A special photo emulsion is cooked for printing the pictures, and the texture of the paper is selected. Depending on the creative intent, manual coloring or toning with natural dyes is applied. In general, the technological process has so many nuances that it is no exaggeration to speak of the exclusivity of each picture. Captivating the attention of viewers with their black-and-white magic, the works of "ArGentum" are exhibited at the "VINZAVOD" Center for Contemporary Art, the FOTOLOFT gallery (Moscow), and also enrich private collections in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Smolensk, and Minsk.

At the meeting titled "SILVER AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY: RETROSPECTIVE," Ekaterina GRINEVSKAYA and Vladislav ANDREEV will talk about the first Vitebsk photographers, about how photography and photo printing used to be done, and how the workshop's artists do it today, achieving the maximum effect of correspondence to the spirit and style of that time. Of course, they will also demonstrate their works, which will be evidence of the fact that photography is not just a moment caught in time.

Information by phone: 35-81-39 and 37-22-92.

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State Institution "Vitebsk Culture Center"

Tel. 37-22-92