San-Francisco

This work has been developed over three trips to Vladivostok. During the research, the connection between Vladivostok and the city located on the opposite shore of the Pacific Ocean - San Francisco - suddenly emerged.

The first sensation of mirroring between two cities arose in 1959, when Khrushchev, after his first trip to the United States, suddenly announced that Vladivostok would one day become the second San Francisco. The two cities have indeed much in common - hilly terrain, proximity to the ocean, port infrastructure, Golden Gate bay on the one side, Golden Horn - on the other. But this ambitious statement seemed incredible in the late 1950s, when Vladivostok was a remote province, a closed naval base, notorious in the recent past as one of the transit camps of DalLag (Far East Penitentiary Labour Camp). “San Francisco” sounded then as a promise of a better future.

In the 1960s, Vladivostok began to be actively built, and pretty soon the fantasies about the dream-city stumbled over the project put into practice. The city has gradually overgrown with standard block houses, while the tops of the hills were abandoned to arbitrary bricolage and occupied by warehouses, landfills, sheds and DIY parking garages. The paradox and the irony of this situation lie in the fact that these spots offer the best views.

I thought that this extreme contrast between the two landscapes – the proximate and the distant – would define Vladivostok best. At the same time these contraries are inseparably linked to each other : the nearest landscape creates and maintains the longing for the most distant one.

To reveal this tension between the proximate and the distant I chose a spot where it was particularly striking : the parking garage cooperative “Armaturshchik”, that offers one of the best postcard views of the city - the view of the Russian bridge. So, I turned one car garage into a photo camera of the simplest design – a camera obscura with the back side covered with photosensitive paper - and in 15 hours of exposure I obtained a photograph, with a pylon of the bridge in the center of the image. The bridge appeared in Vladivostok in 2012 and immediately became the main symbol of the city. As it happened in San Francisco once. Since Khrushchev's visit, the idea of San Francisco in Vladivostok has been forgotten. However, the longing for an abstract America manifested itself within the landscape half a century later. 

The final shot is accompanied by documentary materials, including one photograph of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, made, by a happy coincidence, by a friend artist, Alexey Buldakov, on the same day that I did my garage photograph in Vladivostok.

More images and details can be found at this link : https://www.elizavetakonovalova.com/san-francisco