Gueorgui
Pinkhassov

Dear Shlomi, good morning. As promised, I'll try to share my thoughts with you by answering your questions. Today is 12 January 2025, it's seven in the morning. I'm the last one from our group still in Seville, but I fly to Paris today.

So — the first question: how do you see the mission of your photography? While I'm at it, I'll look at the second and the third. Perhaps they share a common theme, and most likely they're about the same thing, only structured differently. As for me, I'll try to answer honestly in whatever structure I'm capable of. Or rather, I won't structure them at all — I'll just try to explain how I see it, how I feel it, or how I felt it once, back when I was starting out. So — the second question: why do you photograph? What drives you in this process? And the third: what would you call the main intention of your work? What would you want to achieve with your photography?

I see no border between these questions. It seems to me they're about the same thing. But now I'll try to explain what I feel today and what I felt once — when photography had different technical possibilities and different borders with everyday life. The word "borders" is very important here, because today they've been completely broken down. Because if, before, in order to photograph — and I won't reach back into antiquity, I'll speak only about the period I lived through, and let me remind you that I'm now 72, the New Year of '25 was literally two weeks ago, and this year I'll turn 73 — and when I picked up a camera for the first time, then, apart from the desire to photograph (that I'd put in first place), I had to own a camera. Second place — to know how it's built, to be able to use it, to focus, to set the exposure.

And then to be able to develop the film, and after developing, one day (time isn't pressing) to print those photographs, to be able to process them properly, to dry them, and then to do something with them. And in those days, the early sixties, we all shot mainly for ourselves. For our friends — we gave them these photographs as gifts. And some of us who did this loved it very much, everything worked out for them, and they joined circles or clubs. And in my youth it was like that: these interest clubs — some for sport, some for chess, some for music, some for fine art, actors, writers and so on — everyone had their own interest circles. All you had to do was find where they were. Of course there was no internet, all of it was done on foot. Mostly you went to some club or other. Near our house there was the Druzhba club, and a little further away, a bigger one, the Builders' club.

All these clubs were sponsored by some construction organisation or other. I still don't know how, but that's how it worked. Sports grounds where young people played sport. Basement rooms where I went to learn to shoot. Some drama circles. Skating, dancing. But unfortunately my mother wouldn't let me join any of these circles, because she felt I wasn't doing very well at school. And she thought all of it would distract me. And she wanted me to concentrate on my grades. And no matter how I begged her, it was all useless. And only when I got older, emancipated myself a little, I joined a wrestling circle — and very much surprised my mother, because my grades at school got better. This was outside her logic. After all, wrestling took a lot of time. But today you can see how wrong she was.

I told you about an interview with the founder of Revolut — I can't remember his name now — a successful businessman who's already a millionaire or a billionaire, well, it doesn't matter — in any case, his idea is that he has no time at all. And that's why he goes to the gym five times a week for one single reason: so that there will be more time. That is, there isn't more time; he spends it, but he creates a structure that is illogical to a simple mind, where the gym, sport — or, more accurately and more simply, exercise — strongly changes the intensity of the time that remains after the exercise. A person becomes quicker-witted, acts faster, more precisely, overtakes the colleagues who don't know how to charge themselves up or are too lazy to, and who take no pleasure in creativity. For, without suspecting it, they are deprived of the creative principle. So I'm going to restructure your questions, in which the main trigger of creative photography — note, I emphasise the word "creative", not "professional" — is creativity itself.

That is, the pleasure of creativity itself gives incredible energy to the creative process. I don't know how biologists explain this, which hormones and how they're wired in at the moment of this process. In this case we can't spread ourselves so wide as to go into that. So the general answer is that I wanted nothing, I had no missions, I wanted to achieve nothing, I simply took pleasure in this process, which later became a habit. Let's put that in first place.

And in second — how to show your result. How to realise it, let's say to present it, to put your creative work before an audience, in order to get an assessment from connoisseurs or from ignoramuses. In order to understand for yourself who you are.

We all want to understand who we are. Besides the pleasure of knowledge and of creativity, we want to understand who we are. Who needs what we do. Whether we are capable of leaving some trace behind us — no matter whether small or large. That's another subject. The ability to see yourself, to understand as precisely as possible whether you're overestimating yourself or underestimating yourself. How you're moving forward. Progressing or degrading. Today, with the help of the internet, this is easier to do. You can exhibit, for example, on Instagram, put up what you're doing today, and yourself (on your own, or with the help of your subscribers' reactions) see the slope you're climbing up, or already descending. I find this interesting myself. And instead of constantly exhibiting my old and long-since-recognised works, as many recognised photographers do who have unfortunately stopped shooting anything new — and to this I'll add that if a photographer isn't shooting something new, he dies as a photographer.

At the same time he keeps his fame, his greatness, his place in world culture. But that's it, he no longer moves forward. His creative work, of course, continues — now as an expert. He can run masterclasses, constantly accept invitations to all sorts of appearances, interviews, sit on juries. But if he isn't shooting anything new, then he dies as a photographer. So, to come back to the two parts — I divide this into two parts, the creative and the representational — you can exhibit in galleries, in museums, make exhibitions, books, films, or simply show your new photographs on Instagram. That's what I chose: what's simpler, what's more accessible for me and leaves more time for the creative work of making a photograph. What you value more in yourself, and what others value more. Making a book is also creative work, as is, of course, an exhibition, where besides a good print what matters is the wall it hangs on, and the light that falls on your photographs, and the audience, and the timing, and the rankings of galleries, halls, museums.

It seems to me that all of this can be done without me. The main thing for me is to make the photograph, to keep it, to deliver it into the hands that will be able to deal with this after me. But I don't rule out that some curator, designer, laboratory will do it far better than I would. And all of it has to be organised. And for me this is a different profession. I may be far weaker at it than at the original creative work. By which I mean extracting a good file that contains a successful photograph. I'm more preoccupied with the technical side of my instrument of production — my camera, my lens, an iPhone. That's how I see the realities, if you look at photography from my point of view specifically today, 12 January 2025.

Now I'll come back to your questions. So — the first question: how do you see the mission of your photography? For me this is a very pretentious question. I see no mission at all.

If luck is with me, then besides the result I can give an example to those watching me — of how to relate to creative work. But there's a big trap here. Unfortunately, many simply try to repeat, to make something similar. Which is exactly what I try in every way to avoid myself — not to repeat myself. I don't always manage it, but in this I see a failing, not a virtue. My aim as a teacher — not only of others but of myself — is to learn not to repeat myself. There is, after all, a difference between my voice, produced by my articulatory apparatus, my lips, my tongue, and the voice of a well-trained parrot that imitates every sound perfectly, or the voice of this recording device, which reproduces my voice itself. Ahead of us in this field lies the assault of artificial intelligence, which can imitate creativity brilliantly. But creativity itself, fortunately or unfortunately, is at this moment available only to a human being.

This is what people call the divine likeness. The Bible says that God created man in his own image, and the right way to interpret this is as nothing more than the capacity for creation, for making something new. You took my course and you know these terms — prophet and priest. They exist together, like yin and yang, a polar dialectical pair.

The prophet — the creative principle — if it isn't carried forward into the future, that is, if it never finds its priest, disappears, like any brilliant thought that isn't written down, isn't spoken, isn't preserved, or is simply forgotten by its author. Without the priest, as an institution in this sense, nothing reaches future generations. Without the prophet, something does reach them — and what reaches them is nothing. So you must learn not to learn. Repetition is not creation. So we have to work out for ourselves where our own voice is, and where there's a brilliantly imitated voice of a parrot or of artificial intelligence. Undoubtedly one must learn — in the sense of constantly going to museums, knowing the history of art.

Everything we see has the right to influence us, to arouse sympathy in us — in the most literal sense of that word. I'm speaking about fine art, about how much it influences photography. Well, of course, we're obliged to widen this, because it isn't enough to be only a photographer in order to make fine photographs. You have to be a personality. And as personalities we're formed not only by museums but by theatres, concert halls. Our friends, relatives, parents, children, the political situation, the climate, sun, snow — anything can be a trigger for creative work. But photography in this sense has been luckier than all the rest — unlike the musician, who has to train every day, as does the dancer, and the athlete, and the painter. All professions, most of them, are a long road. You have to go through a long training and to perfect yourself in your chosen profession. But photography, as we see today, is far easier to master.

Which is what, at the beginning of the profession, once, after photography was invented — photographers had to be brilliant chemists, let's say physicists, to know and understand how light refracts, to study composition. To know that you're limited by the film, that you have one frame left. Today none of that exists. Instead of the photographer having to learn all this, the technology has learned it itself. It knows better than we do what shutter speeds and apertures to use. Or rather, it frees us from that knowledge. Much as we see without knowing how our eye works. Today a photograph can be taken by any child, even an infant — it's only a matter of pressing a little button. And any accident may well turn out far better than a photograph taken by a diligent, professional photographer.

But let's return to our questions. Question number two: why do you photograph, and what drives you in this process? The answer is very simple: the pleasure of the creative principle. Creativity itself is the main trigger.

But if we're more precise and recall the process — how you made the last photograph that you yourself can recognise as a success — the trigger was not some mission or someone's commission, but simply what you saw in that moment. In that moment you might have been superbly armed, walking with a good, high-quality, professional camera in search of fortunate moments. And here it came. One of them came. There are many such moments, when you're concentrated, observing, peering into everything that surrounds you. You notice something, you shoot something, you gather your catch onto the memory card, so that later, in calm conditions, you can reassess it. And here, too, tragedies can arise. We can overestimate what we've shot. Our heart can beat faster, because it seems to you that here it is, this is the success. But don't rush. How many passions I've seen at my masterclasses, where the participants hurried to show what seemed to them a masterpiece.

But here the person leading it, and the whole group — the first test group, let's say — before it's shown to the public, can disappoint the author or raise doubts in him. But at the same time, going through all the material — and this is the main importance of going through all the material — can allow you to discover something the author didn't notice. And that can turn out to be far more interesting to the people present than the thing he believed in, hoped for and loved. Feedback is extremely important — your own, and that of your near and far circle. That's how I see the process, the creative process during shooting. And the most unfortunate word in your question is the word "why".

I remember I did a story for the Red Cross. It was in Afghanistan. The client received it well. But the Swiss themselves, the Red Cross workers in Afghanistan, to whom for some reason I wanted to show the result, kept asking me this word "why". Why are you shooting all this? Who asked you to? You were asked to shoot this and this specifically, so what's all the rest for?

A person who can't help wanting to know that is incapable of creation. Or rather, is capable — but of a different form of art photography, one thought out in advance. That's more like painters, who have a concept worked out in advance. They begin with a project in which they have to illustrate their pre-conceived ideas. But that isn't street photography. Call it what you like — art photography, invented photography.

I like this initial division of photographs into the invented and the uninvented. In the invented kind, the photographer is a painter and the camera his instrument, where he can distort the photographs, filter them, alter them in every way with Photoshop. Undoubtedly there are many brilliant artists here, whose works fill exhibition halls, museums, commercial art galleries. Their photographs, thanks to gallerists and their advice to limit the edition, can cost insane amounts. And we can admire their masterpieces. But this is a different photography. As I said, here the camera is only an instrument.

Whereas we're in the domain of uninvented photography. And here, too, there's no final term. You can call it street photography, documentary, reportage. But the main sense is that it isn't invented in advance. If you like, here we can use the word "mission". The author takes on the mission of being boundlessly honest, of not abusing Photoshop and excessive filters. Unfortunately, as of today, black-and-white photographs are already considered filtered. It's a new mask, turning a photograph into an old one. But it wasn't like that so very recently. Unlike the ancient Greeks, who knew everything except one thing — that they were ancient — here it's the other way round. Old photography, not so long ago, wasn't old. And colour, still not entirely good at the time, was no guarantee of objectivity. And the train of black-and-white photographic culture was still trailing behind — noble, high-quality, seeming aristocratic at the time.

Some French bank set up the Cartier-Bresson Foundation to support black-and-white photography. You can shoot — and as I see, you do — in a black-and-white process. I don't know how it is for others, but for me it's a filter. Just as you could take another filter, a Polaroid filter, which incidentally I did too in the early days of Instagram, like any other filter that distorts the high-quality, many-pixelled reality that modern technology has newly achieved. Undoubtedly there are differences, in cameras as in lenses. And light makeup is permissible up to the point where you still preserve an objective, real photograph. Well, many, like some who have come to the conclusion that of all drinks the best is plain water, so too…

[The recording ends here.]

Pinkhassov answered in Russian, speaking into his phone. This is a translation; the original transcript is published in full on a separate page.