The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Grant Winner: Igor Tereshkov

The CENTER Awards: Project Launch Grant Winner: Igor Tereshkov by Aline SmithsonMay 7, 2019

©Igor Tereshkov, from Oil and Moss

Congratulations to Igor Tereshkov for being selected for CENTER’s Project launch Grant recognizing his project, Oil and Moss. The Project Launch Award is granted to an outstanding photographer working on a fine art series or documentary project. The grant includes a cash award to help complete or disseminate the works, as well as providing a platform for exposure and professional development opportunities.This grant is awarded to complete or nearly completed projects that would benefit from the grant award package. It requires signature of a contract to participate in an exhibition during Review Santa Fe and offers participation in a winner’s exhibition at the Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.

Juror Virginia Heckert, J. Paul Getty Museum shares her thoughts on her selection:

A few things have become touchstones in my thinking about photography. The first is László Moholy-Nagy’s belief in the late 1920s and early 1930s that an understanding of photography was essential to visual literacy. The second is John Szarkowski’s exploration in his 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows of the dichotomy between understanding a photograph as a means of self-expression that reflects “a portrait of the artist who has made it” and as a method of exploration “through which one might better know the world;” equally important is his conclusion that most photographs communicate in the continuum between these two poles. The third touchstone is the difference in our increasingly screen-filled world between experiencing a photograph as an image or as an object and how material presence enriches that experience.

Igor Tereshkova’s Oil and Moss project seemed to address all three of these criteria. By soaking his 35mm black-and-white negatives in oil before printing them, he makes the increasing threat of oil spills to the indigenous way of life of a Khanty family raising reindeer in Surgut in Western Siberia tangible. His project both explores a little known corner of the world and expresses his deep concern for this environmental hazard.

©Igor Tereshkov, from Oil and Moss

Virginia Heckert, Curator, Department of Photographs, The J. Paul Getty Museum Virginia Heckert has been a curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum since 2005, where she also served as department head from 2014-2018. In addition to organizing exhibitions on Sigmar Polke, August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Irving Penn, and Ed Ruscha from the permanent collection, she has collaborated on presentations of the photographs of Lyonel Feininger and the Bauhaus and Ray K. Metzker and the Institute of Design. The exhibitions Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography (2015) and Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography (2018) addressed the materiality of contemporary approaches to the medium of photography. Prior to joining the Getty Museum, she was the inaugural Curator of Photography at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL (2001-2005). She received her PhD from Columbia University, New York, with a dissertation on the German modernist photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch.

©Igor Tereshkov, from Oil and Moss

Oil and Moss

At the summer of 2018 I arrived to KhMAO (Khanty Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug ) as a Greenpeace and #stopoilspill movement volunteer to shoot whats happens with indigenous people at the north territories full of oil producing.

Near Surgut in Russkinskaya village I met Antonina Tevlina from Khanty people, her mother and father still live an indigenous way of life. Nomadize and grazing reindeers at their ancestral territory of about 600 hectares, they faced a new problem, oil producers came to their land.

Oil spills, pollution of water and lakes, destruction of the ecosystem all this leads to a reduction of the number of the reindeers.

“Yagel moss is like a bread for a deer, if something happens it took around 30 years to restore” – says Antonina Tevlina.

In addition to pollution associated with oil production, the companies mount a checkpoints on all roads leading to the oil wells, now only close relatives on the lists can get to the territory of the ancestral lands, some guests of the family are have to dress up to national Khanty people clothes in case of go throw checkpoints.

In order to visit Antonina’s parents, you have to to walk 3 km. through the swamps, bypassing the oil companies checkpoints, about an hour by car on internal roads thats not marked on maps and around 10 km afoot along marshes and swamps.

About 50% of Russian oil produced in KhMAO, licensed areas often coincide with the places of residence of indigenous peoples.

Local oil workers joke about KhMAO, that this is one large licensed area for oil production.

According to official data of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russia as a result of accidents and transportation of oil, there is about 1.5 million tons of oil are poured out annually to the environment in Russia, this figure is approximately twice the volume of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The main reason for the oil spillage in Russia is rusty oil pipelines with expired lifetime.

Shot on 35mm film, oil-containing liquid from oil spills in KhMAO was used at the stage of film developing . Oil randomly destroys gelatinous “flesh” of film deform it with holes and scratches exactly as harmed environment deformed under the oil spillage.

©Igor Tereshkov, from Oil and Moss

Igor Tereshkov is an 29 years old, Moscow based photographer, born in Energodar (Ukraine USSR) .

Working in documentary and post-documentary photography mediums, experimenting with alternative photo process, cyanotypes and different film developing. Igor research themes of ecology, environment and indigenous people.

In 2017 study documentary photography and photojournalism at School of Modern Photography Docdocdoc in Saint-Petersburg, Russia and since 2018 study on course of “Experiences of Contemporary Photography” .