Shoot! Interview: Yola Monakhov

I had the good fortune to speak yesterday with the lovely Yola Monakhov, who currently has a show entitled Out of Nature at Sasha Wolf Gallery. Monakhov has seen many sides of the photographic coin; she worked as a journalist for years for publications such as Newsweek and The New Yorker and The New York Times, and then decided in 2005 to pursue an MFA degree at Columbia, and switch her focus a bit. Her work is lyrical and thoughtful and is about her investigation of place, time and subjectivity, mapped as image.

This interview also coincides with Flak Photo’s WEEKEND series, a curated selection of
images that highlights work from new photo essays, book projects and
gallery exhibitions. Series photographs are published on Saturdays and
shown throughout the weekend; this month showcases Monakhov’s photographs.

Here is our Q&A:

Does Russia feel like home to you? What’s your homeland identity?

Russia is a part of my identity as a photographer. It’s a place where I
know how to look. I left when I was seven and grew up in New York. I’m
American. I think I style myself as more of a Russian than I actually
am– I just finished teaching Photo I at Columbia and at the end I was
saying something about the American education system and the students
were surprised that I knew about it. They were like “oh we thought you
were Russian.” I think I relate to my idea of Russian-ness in the
regressive way that emigrants do; the country you’re from moves
forward, but you’re sort of stuck in your notion of what it’s about. So
I think I have some kind of notion of it that’s not what it is; I’m not
interested in the Russia that resembles America, like its fast food
restaurants and malls. I’m more looking at the Russia that is romantic
and maybe even nihilistic, the way that college kids in the States read
Dostoevsky. Not as an analysis of the place and a historical condition,
but relating more generally to the ideas it presents. So I think of these
images as being not so much of Russia but of nature ultimately
triumphing over man’s desire to make a spot for himself, and man
persisting in finding and creating beauty.

For example, I have this picture that depicts snow blown into a room,
onto wallpaper that itself depicts and idyllic image of the perfect
autumn season with birch trees, which is a trope of a Russian
landscape, mingled with another similar trope.

Have you found that same trope in New York?

That’s why I have two photographs from New York in the Sasha Wolf show;
one is the Polaroid image of the Shipyards Building in Brooklyn that
has since been destroyed, and another that is an interior from my
apartment. I am looking for it in New York.

What was your initial entre into editorial photography, how did you first get work?

I dropped off a box of prints at Time Out Magazine and an editor there,
Nancy Iaocoi, liked them, and gave me work. Then I wanted to do
something more newsy and international, and in the meantime my father
had moved back to Russia, so I began photographing in Russia in 1999,
just after the ruble collapse. That’s when I got in touch with The New
York Times.

I was in New York at the New York Daily News, (where, incidentally, I
got my favorite expression to chide slacking students: “You can’t
publish excuses, only photographs!”) and I kept wanting to do something
more photographically exciting. I went to the Middle East in 2000, then
to Iran and Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq War. And
in the meantime, I spent a lot of time in Russia and started to see
that I was interested in something else that wasn’t news.

That’s when I bought a large format camera. I still had some more
editorial projects, like I went to Belarus for US News and World
Report. For a long time, I worked in Russia for The Times, but also did
my own work.

Is that when you switched over to a more fine arts format?

When the story broke of the Andijon Massacre it was actually the Spring before I had to start graduate school, in the MFA program in the Fall. I have a Russian passport so I was able to get into Uzbekistan without a visa when no one else was allowed in and was able to report it for The Times. That was very exciting, but also very scary, and that was kind of the last hurrah of photojournalism for me. Then I came back to the United States and started my MFA program.
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Yola Monakhov for The New York Times, May 2005

Was it a jarring change to suddenly be in a fine art context in graduate school, after being in a war zone?

I had to find my own way, and figure out what my identity was. In the
beginning I definitely felt a little weird. The program at Columbia is
interdisciplinary, and I didn’t have much of a language in contemporary
art, but I had a language in modern art and I found I caught on pretty
quickly. Still, I felt that this question of “photojournalism vs. art”
was part of my identity in an unfortunate way, and I think I only shed
it recently. And I’m really glad to have shed it. But you’re right, I’d
almost forgotten that in the beginning it was quite jarring, though I
knew I very much wanted something different.
 

 

The conversation was really interesting about art when in the context
of the whole group of artists there, and it was more about life and
mentorship and the medium of photography with Thomas Roma (who runs the
photography program at the school). It was really enriching to go
through that, as opposed to what I had when I was doing straight
photojournalism, in which there was almost no consciousness about what
people are actually doing, no critical thinking or analysis, and where
you’re so beholden to the industry, and a utilitarian way of thinking.
You go and you do your thing and then you do the next thing.

Tell me about the show you have up now at Sasha Wolf, Once Out of Nature

The show is something that’s actually still in progress. The
photographs were made mostly in Russia, but it’s actually not about
Russia per se, to me, but about looking at Russia as a metaphor for a
type of decay, or relationships and nature and the landscape and memory
and longing and certain basic human things– and home. So I’ve been
photographing there since 1998. The photographs in the show start at
the end of 2003, and about half of them were made in December of last
year. And they’re something I’d look to do a book of, to make a final
product that could make it a more enduring experience.

And what are you doing now?

I’m actually photographing uptown Manhattan now, in Sugar Hill. It
hasn’t yet become corporate. The architectural setting is old and kind
of neglected, but the culture that people make is very much their own,
and a little haphazard, ramshackle and handmade. And I like that. To
see it in Manhattan is fascinating for me.

What’s your process for making these images– are they large format?

Some are large format, some are medium format. I started off with
medium, but in New York I have been using entirely large format.  And
some of the portrait-y photographs are made with strobe, a Lumedyne. My
grandmother in Moscow still complains about having to carry heavy
buckets from the well on a yoke when she was a little girl, and when I
heard that I thought, “oh that’s me, it’s in my blood to carry heavy
stuff.”

Who are influences, photographers you’re looking at now?

I’ve been thinking about Walker Evans for a long time, and Atget. And
in New York– Helen Levitt and Thomas Roma. Walker Evans, because of
the appreciation for the vernacular expression. And Roe Ethridge, I
like a lot. Koudelka, obviously. Harry Callahan; they’re mostly sort of
high modernists. I don’t think I’ve digested a lot of contemporary work
yet.