On Vladimir Kupriyanov’s Exhibition at MMoMA / 2025

Today I would like to recall something inspiring and beautiful. In October 2024, I visited the exhibition The Return of Time — an event that radically transformed my understanding of the future of photography.

This posthumous anthology of Vladimir Kupriyanov’s (1954–2011) legacy — a visionary artist and one of the key figures working at the intersection of photography and conceptual art — occupied the entire second floor of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). It is telling that the project was curated by the legendary Viktor Misiano. In his text for the exhibition, he noted: “The very act of gazing at images of the past, the very experience of temporal duration in viewing, became part of the artwork, and time, having returned, began to last and to live in the present.” This principle defined Kupriyanov’s aesthetics, turning his works into a field of viewer participation and into a space for rethinking the medium of photography.

Kupriyanov’s practice was rooted in working with found and personal photography, yet in his hands this material transcended the limits of the traditional image. Developing complex visual strategies, he demonstrated that photography is above all a medium open to diverse artistic manipulations. His images overcame the boundaries of the two-dimensional plane, transforming into objects, installations, and spatial narratives — offering the viewer not so much an image as a new way of experiencing it.

Having studied the phenomenon of AI over the past two years, I often return to a central question: what is the future of photography in an era when neural networks are capable of generating hyper-realistic, vivid, and dimensional images even from low-quality sources? What comes next? In my view, the answer lies in two key functions of photography, which often intersect by virtue of the medium itself:

First, photography as an act of recording reality. As long as the human body remains material, it demands documentary confirmation of its existence. Second, photography as a field for boundless artistic expression. In both cases, Vladimir Kupriyanov’s legacy appears especially significant: his work opened fundamentally new horizons for photography. And as a photographer, I find this incredibly inspiring.