Playing with Time

As one of my core interests in photography is the feeling of time, since 2014 I have been photographing history fans known as re-enactors. One of the most important directions of their activities in Russia is the re-enactment of the battle of Borodino (1812), which happened during the Russian campaign of Napoleon. This warlike topic takes a new twist in modern Russia, as the official doctrine makes use of the war history by uniting the population around the past victories and making those the pride of the nation. The battle of Borodino, although it cannot be considered a traditional win, is one of those cases. Some re-enactors play the French army, some play the Russians, they build their camps, live in tents and try to be as close to history as possible. Cigarettes, electrical devices and other modern items are prohibited in the camps. The whole game culminates in the reenactment of the famous battle, which attracts lots of spectators. However, the most important part is not the rather short battle, but the backstage life of the re-enactors before this show. By means of photography I try to research how deep you can actually go in this game of time, how well you can hide yourself and modernity, how good you can fool the time and where the time borders are. At the second glance, relatively innocent images show how deep people go in war games and indirectly ask the viewer what this war romanticism really means in the time of real war happening in various places. The black and white images hide the "inappropriate" contemporary objects and imply more effort from the viewer to distinguish between history and modernity. This project was first presented in Moscow at the Biennale 'Fashion and Style in Photography' - as online-art www.time.gordasevich.ru. Then the "Playing with Time" exhibition was on show in the Gallery of Classic Photography in Moscow: fine art prints on Hahnemuehle PhotoRag Pearl (20x30, 40x60, 70x100 cm), with drawings of the French horse grenadier Noirot.