«Art Of Photo» at the Central Exhibition Hall «Manege» / 2025

At the Central Exhibition Hall “Manege” @manegespb the exhibition “Photo Art” is currently on view, presenting nearly 200 years of the development and establishment of photography. I first explored the project on the opening day, July 14, yet I keep returning to it in my thoughts even now. For anyone with a genuine interest in the photographic medium, this exhibition is a must — it runs until October 5, 2025.

What makes this project significant? First of all, it is a rare case in Russia where photography ceases to serve merely as illustrative accompaniment to “high art” and instead occupies a major state institution in its entirety. Secondly, the viewer encounters one of the largest private collections: about 600 photographs are presented, along with several large-scale works created using artificial intelligence algorithms.

The first floor immerses us in the history of the 19th–20th centuries, filled with iconic images and figures. Here, a portrait of Stalin is placed alongside a group portrait of Shostakovich, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, and Rodchenko; a little further — works by Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. Opening this whole chronotope is a unique daguerreotype by Louis Daguerre from 1839, gifted to Nicholas I. Here, photography demonstrates its greatest superpower — to serve as a teleport into past eras. The viewer lives through an experience to which they never truly belonged, yet which still affects them every day. To say it is astonishing would be an understatement.

However, the second floor — which presents photography within the field of contemporary art — raises a number of questions. After the vernissage I asked one of the founders of Beton: did he also feel that the second floor seemed empty and hardly reflected the current state of 21st-century photography? And if so, what, in his view, is the reason? Surprisingly, he agreed and explained that collecting contemporary photography is fraught with difficulties, since Beton builds its collection around innovation in the medium — and right now, in his words, “there is very little of that to be found.”

I keep returning to this dialogue and trying to answer myself: is the situation really so dramatic? I don’t want to agree, but I have few counterarguments. It feels like a field of tension — a theme deserving of a full-fledged discussion and perhaps even a scholarly article.