The Art of Photography: A Conversation with Alexi

In this episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with renowned photographer and printer, Alexi. As we chatted, it became clear that Alexi is not only a talented artist, but also a true master of his craft. One of the things that struck me most about our conversation was the way he approaches his work, particularly in terms of traditional printing methods.

Alexi's approach to hand painting and coloring, as well as toning in black and white printing, is quite unique. He uses traditional means within these established techniques to create stunning images that are both nuanced and expressive. For example, in one of the photographs featured in "City of Shadows", the American flag hanging off a building in New York City stands out for its subtle detail. The gold toning used to reflect the sun's rays also creates a beautiful contrast with the red stripes of the flag, which are actually treated with sepia and selenium toning to achieve their blue hue.

I was also fascinated by Alexi's process of revisiting his older work and how it informs his approach to new projects. He sees himself as an artist who is constantly evolving and improving, and this is reflected in the way he treats his earlier prints. When revisiting old work, Alexi is like a composer reinterpreting their own music – they take the original composition and create new interpretations that reflect their growth and development as artists.

This approach to art and printing is not just limited to Alexi's photography; it also reflects his connection to classical music. As he mentioned during our conversation, many musicians see their compositions as a kind of living, breathing entity that can be reinterpreted and reimagined in different ways. Similarly, when revisiting old work, Alexi sees the same process at play – an artist reinterpreting their own vision through new eyes.

One of the most impressive aspects of Alexi's work is the amount of time and effort that goes into printing his images. This is not a quick or easy process; it requires patience, dedication, and a deep understanding of the craft. And yet, the results are well worth the investment – each print is a testament to Alexi's skill and attention to detail.

As I mentioned earlier, Alexi is one of my favorite photographers working today, and for good reason. His approach to art and printing is truly unique, and his commitment to tradition while also pushing the boundaries of what is possible is inspiring. If you're interested in building a website or online portfolio of your own work, I highly recommend checking out Squarespace.com – they offer an all-in-one solution that's perfect for artists looking to showcase their work.

For those who are interested in learning more about Alexi's work, I'd like to share with you his book "City of Shadows". This stunning collection features many of the photographs mentioned earlier, as well as some new and unseen works. What's remarkable about this book is that it includes a wealth of information about Alexi's process – from his inspirations to his printing techniques – making it a must-have for any serious photography enthusiast.

I also want to give a special shoutout to Squarespace.com for sponsoring this episode of the Art of Photography. Their all-in-one solution has been a game-changer for me, and I'm confident that they can do the same for you. Use offer code AOP at checkout to receive an additional 10% off your order.

If you enjoyed this video, please remember to like it, share it with your friends, and subscribe to the Art of Photography. We'll be back with more episodes in the near future, so stay tuned!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show I want to revisit the work of Alexi Toreno in this video today and he's somebody I've talked a lot about lately mainly cuz I got a chance to meet him the week before last when I was in Los Angeles and if for some reason you haven't seen that video I will link that up in the show description CU I was able to do a little bit of an interview with him and Alexi is amazing I remember the first time I ran across his work this was years ago and he was very much this obscure photographer from Russia that did this amazing work and I remember just Googling trying to find more information or an interview with a guy and really was turning up nothing there was a lot of talk on photography forums of people that were trying to emulate that style and so it obviously had a large attraction with photographers but that was about all I could find and I remember when his first book city of Shadows came out and I bought that and I was just fascinated with the images in there and it was somebody I never really expected to run across or get to talk to and when we weren't rolling the camera I ended up spending a lot of time with him and talked a lot about his work with him and that's what I want to share with you today you know I think with a lot of very success uccessful artists um there's something initial about their work that communicates to us as viewers that draws Us in and I think in the case of Alexi tedar renco it was certainly the long exposures done in daylight with these large crowds of people creating this smoke likee motion moving through the image and then the more you start to get into their work more starts to unveil itself to you as a viewer and certainly getting to talk to Alexi one of the things I was most impressed with are his technical skills both as a photographer and a printer and he's got such a wonderful aesthetic and concept that come across in his work that wasn't the first thing that hit me but then when you're actually looking at his prints you realize this guy is like unbelievably good in further talking to him um a lot of it was growing up in Russia at the time that he did and having very limited access to materials so only one type of film or only one grade contrast of paper to print on and so how do you get around those limitations and those are the things that built his skill level into this really high level that's just just stunningly impressive so what I want to do is I want to look at his most recent book today this is city of sorry the city is a novel uh which contains most of the work of city of Shadows so I think without further do let's go look at the work of Alexi Toreno the city is a novel is a recent publication on the work of Alexi Toreno and previous to this I had another one called city of Shadows and honestly I think of the two books this is the better book this is one that needed to be published on Alexis's work and it is very deserving the print quality is much better it contains most of the city of shadow series which were the images done in St Petersburg like you see on the cover here um in addition to newer work as well and there are works here from New York Havana Venice and I don't normally say this about photo books um particularly monographs but in this one the essays are particularly outstanding there are essays in here from curators like Brett Abbott and Sean corkran and then also an autobiographical essay um from Alexi himself and I think this gives you a wonderful context into how his style evolved into What It ultimately did and his approach as an artist and as a photographer and also you have a lot of reproduced really early works of his when he was working in photo collage and doing some really interesting things um I want to start here with the city of Shadows work and we've talked about these before but you know Alexi's approach to photography uh you know he's kind of like an onion in some ways the more you start to get into him the more layers you realize are there and when you consider the classical approach to photography the way the camera works and all is you have something unique to photography known as depth of field so um some areas are going to be unfocused and some areas are not going to be un focused and traditionally the way this works is usually people um being the subject of something that's what's in focus and a lot of times a technique that you can use with depth the field is to blur out the background to create contrast and the separation of the two Alexi takes a completely different approach to these and what he's done here in a lot of these images is the background is completely clear and then focus and he uses long timlapse photog graphy um where he just leaves the shutter open to create a blur with the subjects in this most these cases people now this this started when he was in St Petersburg and this was in the early 90s at the dissolution of the Soviet Union and you know having obviously myself grown up in the United States this was I think it's something that went largely undocumented it was not something you'd see in the news a lot but the poverty that followed the ruble you know exhausted into nothing at that point um the amount of starvation and hunger uh Unemployment uh prostitution gang violence all on the rise the only public transportation that was in operation at this time with the train system and that's where these images began as these people are coming up the steps to get on the train and Alexi said he would stand in one place just open the shutter and allow the scene to unfold in front of him and then close it later and there was a little bit of experimentation with these but I find it interesting and I think a lot of people who are into Alexis's work have tried to replicate this technique and first of all I think you're kind of missing the point by trying to replicate what he's already done and known for but also I find it very interesting that that there wasn't a whole lot of experimentation with this and when I met Alexi two weeks ago this is one of the things I asked him about in Los Angeles was you know was there a lot of failed shots and failed attempts while he was refining the style and he said really no because you know the amount of poverty to be out on the street with a camera um he didn't want to be seen as suspect or have somebody Rob him or whatever that was and so he said he would go out take a picture and he wouldn't come back for another week to that same location anyway so he didn't want to be known or seen he wanted to stay fairly transparent so all these had this wonderful sense of you know the the environment being in Focus but the people being out of focus and then what becomes important with that work when you start to see the little details things dropped on the ground hands as they're placed on the railing and they sat there for a minute and they they maintained a little bit of sharpness in the exposure uh another thing that's veryimportant important to Alexi and his work are small details in the background so you know and if you watch the video where I did the little short interview with him he was talking about all the things you see in this image uh the open doors are significant uh the amount of crime uh why would a door be open over on this side or even like you know the the Soviet newspaper stand over here you know those little details the unpack of the the Fallen pack of unfiltered cigarettes the very cheap um the clothes people wearing the shoes uh you know really painting that scene and I think this is you know Photography in many ways you know I think is an art and comes as a lot of different things there's an aesthetic element um which we certainly find very interesting in Alexis's work so you have the aesthetic as well as you know the documentation of being in a time and a place and if you look at the Golden Age of of photojournalism and people like hre C Bron Robert Frank they documented their time and I think what Lex's done here is he has documented his time and I think this is something that's largely especially with these images in St Petersburg you know underdocumented and realizing this part of history is very important the other thing that is really interesting about Alexi's work is his use of printing techniques and Alexi is a fabulous printer um he showed me a lot of his prints and talked me through the process and it was just fascinating to watch him go through that um a lot of this was born out of frustration of growing up in the Soviet Union and having very limited access um to different contrast papers and different things he could do in in the dark room so a lot of the techniques evolved in his own style um trying to make use of what he could do with the materials he had so you're going to see uh really interesting things done with toning um sometimes sepia sometimes gold um sometimes selenium um also techniques like solarization like in this shot which interestingly enough he he said he shot on a pentacon 6 before he switched to the hustle blot and this was an earlier shot but you see the solarization in the way that I don't know if it's going to pick up on the video or not but the um the way this roof line is defined against the sky and so there's a lot of subtleties like that and what I really like about Alexi in his printing style is he incorporates a lot of these things into his work and they're very subtle in some ways uh sometimes they're born out of uh necessity like you know for instance he mentioned this was an early image of these people entering the the train station but it's it's entirely too dense down here and it's really hard to work with this negative whereas he said this one that it's actually the same shot that's on the cover was it was immediate read off the negative that it was going to be easier to print so if we look at some of Alexis's more recent work um these were taken in Venice and you're going to see that a lot of the same approach is carried out where you have a scene that is largely in focus and people in the image blur and they do it very differently in the more recent work and obviously this is because they're telling a very different story they're not telling the same story of what was going on in Russia in the early 90s and so what's interesting to me though and I think this is where the book title gets his name Alexi says in the intro biography in this in this book that you know when he was a little kid he used to wake up really early in the morning and to stay quiet until the rest of the family W woke up he would do a lot of reading and one thing that always captivated his imagination uh while reading um in novels was the way authors would describe scenery or Villages or apartments or towns and they almost had a personality of their own and that's where the book gets its title the city is a novel and so you you see that same technique carried out in all of these and then the action of what's going on with figures in the foreground does become very much more interpretive and I think this is you know it really is at the core of what Alexis's style is and what he's going for and what his aesthetic ends up being um and again like I said the printing is amazing on some of these too they they start to hint at being colored a little bit but they're not and so you just have little selective toning going on in various parts of this image and sometimes this gets really complex like for instance this one that's a more of a night scene where you have like what would end up being implied as a Sunset and this is a technique that normally historically in photography we would associate with hand painting or hand coloring and the way Alexi approaches it is it's using traditional means within black and white printing still of toning to get those suggested and there's one in here that I find just stunning that I think is is is really quite interesting because the amount of time that it actually takes to do these in the dark room is it's an investment so for instance on this one which is taken a New York City on the street and what you see here and this is a subtle detail but the American flag hanging off of this building and you can see that in the context of a black and white image we do have the gold toning with the sun's reflecting but we actually have red white and blue on the flag well white is obviously going to show up in black and white but the red is actually a treatment of sepia toning those stripes and then selenium toning to get the blue and so they're they're there's small details like this U the book is very well printed but to see these in person is just really impressive when you consider the amount of time that goes into printing these and also I think the way that that Alexi treats his older work is that you know it's almost in many ways you know there's a strong musical connection to a lot of this work in the way you would work with classical music where you have a composition and then you have recordings or interpretations of that composition and you know anel Adams made that connection too and the way he approached printing um but I think Alexi is really defining that too when you go revisit your early work and and your improvements as a printer may have an impact on how that work is printed today and so they interpretations of the original in in every case and I I think it's amazing so anyway I will link up to this book in the show notes and as I mentioned Alexi I think is one of the most important living photographers today um I think the way he documents the aesthetic of which he approaches things with um and just the the skill that he has not only as a photographer but also a printer uh make him one of the one of the finest photographers living today if you if you are interested in building a website or online portfolio of your own work you might want to consider our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace.com is an all-in-one solution for building absolutely beautiful websites in fact their slogan is build it beautiful if you head over to their website you can do a trial absolutely free they don't even ask for a credit card and what you're going to do is select a template to start with their templates are absolutely gorgeous and all of them are completely customizable so you won't look like another website that's out there and then they have an amazing back backend system and literally if you can drag and drop a folder of images onto a web browser and then click and drag to sort them and title them you can build an online portfolio and if you decide you want to subscribe to Squarespace I can save you an additional 10% off at checkout what you want to do is go over to squarespace.com sign up for the free trial and on checkout you're going to use offer code aop that is offer code aop and that is going to save you an additional 10% off your order and once again I want to give a special shout out to the folks at Squarespace and thank them for once again sponsoring another episode of the Art of Photography so I wanted to share some of this stuff with you guys today because you know I did do a little bit of interview with Alexi and of course you know when you're talking to someone and the cameras aren't on there's a lot less pressure and you end up asking questions and having a conversation and a lot of these things I just wanted to share with you guys today Alexi is one of my favorites and he is a brilliant person he is a really nice guy too and as I mentioned before I really am trying to get him to do something with the show because I just want to share more of his work and his talents with you guys I will link up the city as a novel in the show notes um city of Shadows is also good but I think this is the better book of the two mainly because the text is here and most of the first book is included here and the printing quality is a lot better on this as well so if you guys are interested in that I'll put a link in the show description so anyway as always thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and also subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos that we do here until the next video I'll see you guys laterwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show I want to revisit the work of Alexi Toreno in this video today and he's somebody I've talked a lot about lately mainly cuz I got a chance to meet him the week before last when I was in Los Angeles and if for some reason you haven't seen that video I will link that up in the show description CU I was able to do a little bit of an interview with him and Alexi is amazing I remember the first time I ran across his work this was years ago and he was very much this obscure photographer from Russia that did this amazing work and I remember just Googling trying to find more information or an interview with a guy and really was turning up nothing there was a lot of talk on photography forums of people that were trying to emulate that style and so it obviously had a large attraction with photographers but that was about all I could find and I remember when his first book city of Shadows came out and I bought that and I was just fascinated with the images in there and it was somebody I never really expected to run across or get to talk to and when we weren't rolling the camera I ended up spending a lot of time with him and talked a lot about his work with him and that's what I want to share with you today you know I think with a lot of very success uccessful artists um there's something initial about their work that communicates to us as viewers that draws Us in and I think in the case of Alexi tedar renco it was certainly the long exposures done in daylight with these large crowds of people creating this smoke likee motion moving through the image and then the more you start to get into their work more starts to unveil itself to you as a viewer and certainly getting to talk to Alexi one of the things I was most impressed with are his technical skills both as a photographer and a printer and he's got such a wonderful aesthetic and concept that come across in his work that wasn't the first thing that hit me but then when you're actually looking at his prints you realize this guy is like unbelievably good in further talking to him um a lot of it was growing up in Russia at the time that he did and having very limited access to materials so only one type of film or only one grade contrast of paper to print on and so how do you get around those limitations and those are the things that built his skill level into this really high level that's just just stunningly impressive so what I want to do is I want to look at his most recent book today this is city of sorry the city is a novel uh which contains most of the work of city of Shadows so I think without further do let's go look at the work of Alexi Toreno the city is a novel is a recent publication on the work of Alexi Toreno and previous to this I had another one called city of Shadows and honestly I think of the two books this is the better book this is one that needed to be published on Alexis's work and it is very deserving the print quality is much better it contains most of the city of shadow series which were the images done in St Petersburg like you see on the cover here um in addition to newer work as well and there are works here from New York Havana Venice and I don't normally say this about photo books um particularly monographs but in this one the essays are particularly outstanding there are essays in here from curators like Brett Abbott and Sean corkran and then also an autobiographical essay um from Alexi himself and I think this gives you a wonderful context into how his style evolved into What It ultimately did and his approach as an artist and as a photographer and also you have a lot of reproduced really early works of his when he was working in photo collage and doing some really interesting things um I want to start here with the city of Shadows work and we've talked about these before but you know Alexi's approach to photography uh you know he's kind of like an onion in some ways the more you start to get into him the more layers you realize are there and when you consider the classical approach to photography the way the camera works and all is you have something unique to photography known as depth of field so um some areas are going to be unfocused and some areas are not going to be un focused and traditionally the way this works is usually people um being the subject of something that's what's in focus and a lot of times a technique that you can use with depth the field is to blur out the background to create contrast and the separation of the two Alexi takes a completely different approach to these and what he's done here in a lot of these images is the background is completely clear and then focus and he uses long timlapse photog graphy um where he just leaves the shutter open to create a blur with the subjects in this most these cases people now this this started when he was in St Petersburg and this was in the early 90s at the dissolution of the Soviet Union and you know having obviously myself grown up in the United States this was I think it's something that went largely undocumented it was not something you'd see in the news a lot but the poverty that followed the ruble you know exhausted into nothing at that point um the amount of starvation and hunger uh Unemployment uh prostitution gang violence all on the rise the only public transportation that was in operation at this time with the train system and that's where these images began as these people are coming up the steps to get on the train and Alexi said he would stand in one place just open the shutter and allow the scene to unfold in front of him and then close it later and there was a little bit of experimentation with these but I find it interesting and I think a lot of people who are into Alexis's work have tried to replicate this technique and first of all I think you're kind of missing the point by trying to replicate what he's already done and known for but also I find it very interesting that that there wasn't a whole lot of experimentation with this and when I met Alexi two weeks ago this is one of the things I asked him about in Los Angeles was you know was there a lot of failed shots and failed attempts while he was refining the style and he said really no because you know the amount of poverty to be out on the street with a camera um he didn't want to be seen as suspect or have somebody Rob him or whatever that was and so he said he would go out take a picture and he wouldn't come back for another week to that same location anyway so he didn't want to be known or seen he wanted to stay fairly transparent so all these had this wonderful sense of you know the the environment being in Focus but the people being out of focus and then what becomes important with that work when you start to see the little details things dropped on the ground hands as they're placed on the railing and they sat there for a minute and they they maintained a little bit of sharpness in the exposure uh another thing that's veryimportant important to Alexi and his work are small details in the background so you know and if you watch the video where I did the little short interview with him he was talking about all the things you see in this image uh the open doors are significant uh the amount of crime uh why would a door be open over on this side or even like you know the the Soviet newspaper stand over here you know those little details the unpack of the the Fallen pack of unfiltered cigarettes the very cheap um the clothes people wearing the shoes uh you know really painting that scene and I think this is you know Photography in many ways you know I think is an art and comes as a lot of different things there's an aesthetic element um which we certainly find very interesting in Alexis's work so you have the aesthetic as well as you know the documentation of being in a time and a place and if you look at the Golden Age of of photojournalism and people like hre C Bron Robert Frank they documented their time and I think what Lex's done here is he has documented his time and I think this is something that's largely especially with these images in St Petersburg you know underdocumented and realizing this part of history is very important the other thing that is really interesting about Alexi's work is his use of printing techniques and Alexi is a fabulous printer um he showed me a lot of his prints and talked me through the process and it was just fascinating to watch him go through that um a lot of this was born out of frustration of growing up in the Soviet Union and having very limited access um to different contrast papers and different things he could do in in the dark room so a lot of the techniques evolved in his own style um trying to make use of what he could do with the materials he had so you're going to see uh really interesting things done with toning um sometimes sepia sometimes gold um sometimes selenium um also techniques like solarization like in this shot which interestingly enough he he said he shot on a pentacon 6 before he switched to the hustle blot and this was an earlier shot but you see the solarization in the way that I don't know if it's going to pick up on the video or not but the um the way this roof line is defined against the sky and so there's a lot of subtleties like that and what I really like about Alexi in his printing style is he incorporates a lot of these things into his work and they're very subtle in some ways uh sometimes they're born out of uh necessity like you know for instance he mentioned this was an early image of these people entering the the train station but it's it's entirely too dense down here and it's really hard to work with this negative whereas he said this one that it's actually the same shot that's on the cover was it was immediate read off the negative that it was going to be easier to print so if we look at some of Alexis's more recent work um these were taken in Venice and you're going to see that a lot of the same approach is carried out where you have a scene that is largely in focus and people in the image blur and they do it very differently in the more recent work and obviously this is because they're telling a very different story they're not telling the same story of what was going on in Russia in the early 90s and so what's interesting to me though and I think this is where the book title gets his name Alexi says in the intro biography in this in this book that you know when he was a little kid he used to wake up really early in the morning and to stay quiet until the rest of the family W woke up he would do a lot of reading and one thing that always captivated his imagination uh while reading um in novels was the way authors would describe scenery or Villages or apartments or towns and they almost had a personality of their own and that's where the book gets its title the city is a novel and so you you see that same technique carried out in all of these and then the action of what's going on with figures in the foreground does become very much more interpretive and I think this is you know it really is at the core of what Alexis's style is and what he's going for and what his aesthetic ends up being um and again like I said the printing is amazing on some of these too they they start to hint at being colored a little bit but they're not and so you just have little selective toning going on in various parts of this image and sometimes this gets really complex like for instance this one that's a more of a night scene where you have like what would end up being implied as a Sunset and this is a technique that normally historically in photography we would associate with hand painting or hand coloring and the way Alexi approaches it is it's using traditional means within black and white printing still of toning to get those suggested and there's one in here that I find just stunning that I think is is is really quite interesting because the amount of time that it actually takes to do these in the dark room is it's an investment so for instance on this one which is taken a New York City on the street and what you see here and this is a subtle detail but the American flag hanging off of this building and you can see that in the context of a black and white image we do have the gold toning with the sun's reflecting but we actually have red white and blue on the flag well white is obviously going to show up in black and white but the red is actually a treatment of sepia toning those stripes and then selenium toning to get the blue and so they're they're there's small details like this U the book is very well printed but to see these in person is just really impressive when you consider the amount of time that goes into printing these and also I think the way that that Alexi treats his older work is that you know it's almost in many ways you know there's a strong musical connection to a lot of this work in the way you would work with classical music where you have a composition and then you have recordings or interpretations of that composition and you know anel Adams made that connection too and the way he approached printing um but I think Alexi is really defining that too when you go revisit your early work and and your improvements as a printer may have an impact on how that work is printed today and so they interpretations of the original in in every case and I I think it's amazing so anyway I will link up to this book in the show notes and as I mentioned Alexi I think is one of the most important living photographers today um I think the way he documents the aesthetic of which he approaches things with um and just the the skill that he has not only as a photographer but also a printer uh make him one of the one of the finest photographers living today if you if you are interested in building a website or online portfolio of your own work you might want to consider our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace.com is an all-in-one solution for building absolutely beautiful websites in fact their slogan is build it beautiful if you head over to their website you can do a trial absolutely free they don't even ask for a credit card and what you're going to do is select a template to start with their templates are absolutely gorgeous and all of them are completely customizable so you won't look like another website that's out there and then they have an amazing back backend system and literally if you can drag and drop a folder of images onto a web browser and then click and drag to sort them and title them you can build an online portfolio and if you decide you want to subscribe to Squarespace I can save you an additional 10% off at checkout what you want to do is go over to squarespace.com sign up for the free trial and on checkout you're going to use offer code aop that is offer code aop and that is going to save you an additional 10% off your order and once again I want to give a special shout out to the folks at Squarespace and thank them for once again sponsoring another episode of the Art of Photography so I wanted to share some of this stuff with you guys today because you know I did do a little bit of interview with Alexi and of course you know when you're talking to someone and the cameras aren't on there's a lot less pressure and you end up asking questions and having a conversation and a lot of these things I just wanted to share with you guys today Alexi is one of my favorites and he is a brilliant person he is a really nice guy too and as I mentioned before I really am trying to get him to do something with the show because I just want to share more of his work and his talents with you guys I will link up the city as a novel in the show notes um city of Shadows is also good but I think this is the better book of the two mainly because the text is here and most of the first book is included here and the printing quality is a lot better on this as well so if you guys are interested in that I'll put a link in the show description so anyway as always thank you for watching and if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and also subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos that we do here until the next video I'll see you guys later\n"