"Near your House": the Russian village in the works of Andrey Kremenchuk

Russian photographer and ethnographer Andrey Kremenchuk was born in 1973 in Gorky. Having studied at the Faculty of "Restoration, Conservation and storage of works of DPI made of museum metal" at SPbGUKI and at the Vladimir Music School, Kremenchuk collects folklore of the Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod regions. During an expedition to the village of Vladimirskoye, Nizhny Novgorod region, on Lake Svetloyar, Andrey Kremenchuk begins to be interested in photography. In the late 90s, he entered one of the German universities and moved to Germany, where he lives to this day.

Kremenchuk received recognition abroad thanks to the photobook No Direction Home ("Near your House"), published in 2009, by Kehrer publishing house. The author tells in it about his small homeland, about the incessant series of send-offs, goodbyes and funerals, which he happened to witness; farewells to places that lost their familiar appearance and to people who were close to the author. This work is a kind of search for cultural belonging, a desire to understand, being far from home, what is important in our memory and what we are irretrievably losing.

Andrey Kremenchuk: "I have to tell you about this place… My house. I am 5 years old. My grandparents and I are walking along a forest path that leads to our village. Hot. In a forest clearing by the river, grandma puts hard-boiled eggs, salt, and some pickles on a newspaper. And dragonflies fly in the shimmering air."