Art or Accident?

One of these photos is part of an exhibition in Moscow. The other was made by a student in half an hour. Can you tell the difference? And more importantly — does it even matter? A&R explores what makes photography art.

Some of my groupmates and I once came back from a photo exhibition at Béton Center of Visual Culture, Moscow, and tried to recreate it. Literally. Inspired by the display, we set up a small creative experiment: what if we mimicked the style of the featured photographers? What would come out of it? The result was a few attached images: quiet, or expressively abstract, oddly satisfying, or triggering an inner thrill. The shoots took no longer than half an hour. Looking at the images of the Béton display — a package on a rope, a crowdless street, an ascetic winter forest, — we asked ourselves: why do some pictures end up in museums while others live and die on our phones? And what makes a photograph a piece of art?

These questions are at the core of Behind the Wall of Ideology, an exhibition that ran in Béton from January 29th to March 16th, 2025. The show brought together 76 works by Soviet and post-Soviet photographers. Alexey Loginov, a historian of photography and Béton’s art director, points out: “Basically, photography of the 20th century is associated with photo reports. But there was a different part of it — the one behind the wall of ideology.”

That “different part” is what the exhibition sets out to explore — photo artists who worked in conditions of censorship, stagnation, and ideological rigidity, yet managed to find visual freedom and poetic depth in everyday surroundings. The focus is on the 1970s–1990s, although a few earlier works are included as well.

One of them is Boris Smirnov’s Multiple Exposure series from the 1930s. Each image overlays several shots into a single composite frame. What can now be done on any phone app in seconds took hours of careful analog processing back then. The result? Dreamlike, ghostly layers, an early step toward ambiguity.

This sense of experimentation is taken to a metaphysical level in the works of Valentin Samarin, the central figure of the exhibition. In the 1970s, Samarin invented his own development technique called Sanki, using complex chemical compounds to create surreal, blurred, watercolor-like photographs. One of his most haunting works is from Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, depicting faceless ballet dancers suspended in space, trembling with silence and unease. “Samarin was a philosopher, a metaphysician,” says Olga Michi, founder of Béton. “He always stated that a camera is able to capture other worlds.”

But not all photographers presented in the exhibition reached beyond reality. Some of them found themselves leaning into it. Yevgeny Likhosherst, for example, turned his lens toward the barren, the empty, the deadpan. In his View from the Topseries, black-and-white winter forests look almost abstract, just mere stains and lines. One photo, titled Clothespins, shows a couple of plastic bags clipped to a rope. At first, it looks like nothing. Then, oddly, like minimalist art, Likhosherst’s work challenges the viewer: is this boring, or is it quietly sublime?

Fifty years ago, such images were dismissed, or worse, condemned. Soviet photography was expected to inform and inspire, not reflect or meditate. Pictures of silence and desolation were not seen as useful to society. Yet, it was precisely in this ‘uselessness’ that artists like Samarin and Likhosherst found a visual language of their own.

It took effort, patience, and imagination to extract beauty from banality, or even from absence.

Which brings us back to our experiment. Yes, our photos looked similar. But something essential was missing. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was risk. Maybe it was a sense of distance from the world, and from the viewer. The original photographers worked without precedent, without support, and without much to hope for and to marvel at. They inherited little and anticipated less. And yet, in that void, they discovered a quiet kind of meaning.

That beauty was the real value.