Homeless people showed how they see St. Petersburg at a photo exhibition

Photo exhibition City. Approximation. Man “reported by the correspondent of” Rosbalt “. This is a joint project of the Nochlezhka Charitable Organization, which helps homeless people, the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall and a number of companies. The photographs were taken by homeless people.

Ksenia Solodova, project curator of Nochlezhka, said that the idea was born by the organization’s employees a year ago. Fifteen homeless people who lived in the Nochlezhka shelter decided to try themselves as photographers. And two professionals – Pavel Volkov and the chief photographer of the Hermitage Yuri Molodkovets – held two theoretical master classes and practical exercises on the streets of St. Petersburg with the homeless.

Rather, it was walking around the city, talking about it, searching for plots and angles.

“I tried to show the beauty of the city as I see it, to show different images of St. Petersburg,” said Yury Molodkovets. The Hermitage photographer has already participated in one of Nochlezhka’s art projects: he created portraits of the homeless against the backdrop of the architectural masterpieces of St. Petersburg. This project was carried out under the slogan, also invented by the employees of the charitable organization: “Petersburg is so beautiful that some can admire it around the clock. Because they don’t have a home.” This inconsistency, embedded in one phrase, and a photo of a homeless person among urban monuments and classical landscapes, according to the photographer, gave people the opportunity to think about the problem of homelessness.

The exhibition, which opened in front of the Manege, for the first time showed homeless people not as models (last year there was an exhibition of sculptural portraits of the homeless in the garden of the Akhmatova Museum – ed.), but as creators. Of the fifteen participants, six decided to show their work. Moreover, one author asked not to be named and not to publish a photo. The other five agreed: Tatyana, Evgeny, Andrey, Sergey, Oleg – each of them has his own story, his own experience. And for everyone, the opportunity to take pictures has become a joy, a creative act. “It’s as if I emerged from the dullness,” Sergey, one of the authors of the photo, commented on his participation in the project.

In the photographs – the blue sky, St. Petersburg streets, cherry blossoms, timid leaves of trees in April – the shooting took place just in the spring of last year. “It’s good that they filmed the city in the spring, not in the winter, not as a hostile cold space,” Ksenia Solodova told a Rosbalt correspondent.

All the homeless authors of the photographs, except for one, Oleg, have already left the Nochlezhka shelter – they work and rent housing. Therefore, they could not come to the opening day – they were busy.

The open-air exhibition will last until April 10. Nochlezhka will probably print postcards with these photos, make posters for a restaurant that will soon open in the center of St. Petersburg and will be staffed by former homeless people.