Boris Smelov became, during his lifetime, a legend of Saint Petersburg photography, a significant figure in unofficial art, and the unceremonial mystical image of the city on the Neva that he created is compared to Brodsky's poetry.
It is accurate to call Boris Smelov a flâneur — a person who walks the city without a goal, strolling the streets, but not idle; rather, he is in a state of focused, attentive observation, both of his own feelings and of the city around him.
"In my photography the city occupies a dominant place, although lately, in order to enliven it (and for that reason only), I pay more attention to people in the city," Smelov admits. "I shoot in infrared light on special film. Previously I shot on high-speed emulsions with a red filter to achieve a certain drama, density, a concentration of Petersburg. Infrared film delighted me because it gives a new quality and a completely different graphic effect. Shooting on infrared film helps me emphasize a kind of cosmism of the city, of its objects, its epicness, significance, tragedy. And photographs taken on ordinary film in foggy weather, given the limitation or absence of backgrounds, essentially by the foreground and this delicate pearly grayness emphasize a certain localized lyricism. But I must say that in both cases a romantic approach prevails in my photographs."
Boris Smelov. View into the Courtyard, 1975.
Boris Smelov. Lover of Sour, 1975.
Boris Smelov. Pigeon, 1975.
Boris Smelov. Apollo with a Spider, 1978.
Boris Smelov. Still Life.
Boris Smelov. At the Garages, 1980s.
Boris Smelov. Spring Frog Hunt, 1995.
The photographer's subtle lyrical worldview, his attitude to life, his inner culture are no less important than the lens and the film. And the prism through which the author looks at the world, filtering it through himself, cultivates a taste for a certain kind of aesthetics — the aesthetics of the unpretentious, the grandiose, the timeless, the mysterious, on the border of reality and dreams, of Petersburg.
Thus Smelov, with his love of Dostoevsky's philosophy and Mozart's music, his orientation toward the poetry of photography, while remaining faithful to photographic craft, captures fragments of life shrouded in mystery: he removes historical context, creating a new, intuitively readable story, whether tender portraits of people, the dark, roaring waves of the Neva overtaking the city, a bright dove descending from a roof parapet, weightless like an image of the Holy Spirit, the foggy Summer Garden with frozen sculptures, or ascetic and poetic everyday still lifes.
Boris Smelov. Embankment of the Ekaterininsky Canal. Flood. 1980.
Boris Smelov. The Summer Garden.
Boris Smelov. Still Life.
Boris Smelov. Still Life with Shadows.
Boris Smelov. Snowfall, 1997.
Boris Smelov. Nikolaevsky Bridge, 1995.
Boris Smelov. Path in the Fog, 1985.
"You want the sun and the moon, and the flood and the snow — all of that in one frame??? But that's the end of the world?" asks B. Smelov's pupil Maria Snegirevskaya. "Yes," replies the photographer.
To date, the works of Boris Ivanovich Smelov are held in the collections of:
UNESCO
Corcoran Gallery, Washington
Rapho, Paris, France
Zimmerli Art Museum, USA
Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago
Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA), Moscow
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSFOTO, Saint Petersburg
Museum of Nonconformist Art, Saint Petersburg
