Three most "live" exhibitions within the framework of the festival "Fashion and style in photography"

Many of you probably know that Moscow is currently hosting the annual Fashion and Style in Photography festival. The festival is held for the eighth time, lasts a total of more than three months (from February 20 to May 26) and brings together 7 venues and more than 50 different exhibitions. The theme of this year's festival is Beauty: Myths and Inspirations.

We have chosen the three most interesting, in our opinion, exhibitions that represent not a frozen gloss, but real, living life in different parts of the world at different times, which you can visit in Moscow right now.

(Total 26 photos)

Malik Sidibe. Life in pink.

The exhibition runs at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation until May 12

1. The exhibition presents a selection of about fifty mostly unpublished photographs taken by Malik Sidibé in the capital of Mali, Bamako, during the 1960s and 70s.

2. These pictures fully convey the atmosphere of the noisy life of Bamako in those years when the capital of Mali was captured by the desire for universal unity and integration into the world historical process.

3. Malik Sidibe was born in 1936 in Soloba, a village located 300 km from Bamako. As a young man, Sidibé became interested in photography and decided to become an apprentice in the photography studio of Gérard Guillaume-Guinard after a French photographer commissioned him to decorate his studio.

4. In 1957 Sidibé began by reporting on parties, christenings, and weddings. At the beginning of his career, he is in the status of a "free artist".

5. But already in 1962 he opens his own studio "Malik" in Bagadadzhi, a popular area of Bamako, where he continues to work as a portrait painter.

6. In addition to photographic portraits, Sidibé shot a lot of Bamako at night and afternoons on the banks of the Niger River: Mali won independence just two years ago, and the country was overwhelmed with new energy and enthusiasm.

7. Streams of news and information flowed into it; films were brought from Europe, India and the USA, but the most rapid and large-scale changes in Bamako society were mainly caused by music. The photographer went to parties for young people dressed in Western fashion and dancing to popular tunes; his photographs depicted cheerful young people full of passion for life and hope for the future.

8. Nightclubs with exotic names were opening all over the city, and Sidibe was invited to all the big events. His fame was so great that if he failed to come, the time and even the day of the party could be postponed.

9. Now Malik Sidibé still lives and works in Bamako, considered one of Africa's most respected photographers.

Tom Wood. Britannia. 1973–2012

The exhibition runs at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation until May 12

10. The exhibition by British photographer Tom Wood covers about 40 years of almost daily work and includes images from the most famous series and albums - "Men and Women", "In Search of Love", "All Zones Off Rush Hour", "Bus Odyssey", "The Man with the Camera", "People".

11. The photographs, whose style is described as "laid-back, instinctive and perfectly accurate", depict the street life of Liverpool, New Brighton and Merseyside.

12. The photographer's projects are extremely diverse. From 1982 to 1985, Wood photographed at the Chelsea Reach pub in Chelsea, resulting in the coming-of-age series Finding Love. The photo shows the author himself with friends in 1983.

13. For 18 years, he rode Liverpool buses and filmed passers-by from windows - from the resulting 100,000 negatives, the book "All zones Off Peak" was compiled.

14. For three years, from 1993 to 1996, he photographed at the Camel Laird shipyard in Liverpool.

15. The photographer himself does not like being classified as a documentary and prefers to be called a "realist".

16. Wood took a lot of pictures and was in no hurry to show his photos or earn money from them, did not seek fame. “I wanted to give my shots a maturation period, each of them should be a discovery. It's like asking a question, you just don't know which photos are outstanding,” he says. Even after so many years of filming, Wood likes to point out that he is still learning how to photograph and convey feelings through photography.

17. “Becoming a good photographer can be pretty fast, but creating real material is like pushing a rock uphill,” says the author.

18. Currently, Tom Wood lives in North Wales, shoots local landscapes, works on several projects and is preparing new books for publication.

Nikita Shokhov. Black Sea holidays

The exhibition runs at the Zurab Tsereteli Art Gallery until May 12

19. Nikita Shokhov is a young photographer from Yekaterinburg. In 2010, he came to Moscow, dreaming of entering VGIK.

20. Nikita could not enter VGIK, but photography, initially necessary only for admission to the camera department, fascinated him.

21. Now he is completing his studies at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia.

22. At the Rodchenko school, Nikita is a student of the workshop of Igor Mukhin. Hence the civic position and critical attitude to the problems of society; American visual expression, frankness and short distance to the subject; involvement in the event; project, serial and even scenario approach to work.

23. “My main rule: there are no rules,” says the young author.

24. Nikita about his project: “The city of Sochi is the most famous resort in Russia. As a child, I often rested there, and for me the face of the city is the beach. When Sochi was chosen to host the 2014 Olympic Games, its image changed dramatically. Now Sochi is positioned as a city of the future, meeting the highest requirements in the field of security, infrastructure, ecology and comfort.”

25. “The authorities are trying to hastily create the declared conditions, given that there was nothing of this in Sochi. The more absurd is the Sochi beach today, which has not changed a bit since the Soviet era. The same bodies in the same postures absorb the same corn and warm the delicate skin in the sun. In three weeks, they will also return to central Russia, the Urals and Siberia.”

26. By the way, these photos were taken in Sochi a year before they were presented at the exhibition, visiting which you can compare and independently evaluate the progress of both the photographer and the city itself.