Dmitry Provotorov was born in Leningrad in 1975. He started to take photos in 1999, in 1999-2000 was a student of Leningrad Motion Picture Engineers Institute (LIKI), photography department. Since 2000 he has been working with b/w; uses toning, experimental hand-printing.
Participated in a great number of personal and group exhibitions.
Dmitry’s works are now part of Moscow House of Photography, State St.Petersburg Centre of Photography and private collections.
Dmitry Provotorov’s works bring together play and seriousness, real life and fantasy, present with past and future, reality and ephemera. The artist analyses seeming, delusive, and relative freedom of a human at the turn of Millenium, and his works pretty well demonstrate Aristotle’s paradox: “If you want to be serious, play”.
And the author plays with form and content, colour and half-tints, technique and methodology of his artistic statement, with images, models, surface of the negative and print. He transforms continuum of space-time and creates certain shifts, crossings of suggestive meanings and various realities both behind and in front of the camera. Choosing photography as a means to express his artistic point of view, Dmitry acts like a sculptor, extracting an artificial image from the photo, giving birth to unique forms, thrilling in their anachronism. Rejecting computer technologies that deprive of individuality, Provotorov processes photos by hand and never passes this authority to a machine. The artist’s hand is physically present in each of his creations; the negative is processed without any mediators in direct contact of the author and his work. The photographer uses various additional effects such as toning or engraving-like scratching and makes the printing. Provotorov reveals the surface texture of his photos at every stage and finally combines intricate compositions of strokes, silhouettes, tints, and lines. The feeling of break-up and creation, refraction and even deconstruction of the image, together with peculiar broken perfectionism of the author’s style, lead to the whole complex of almost tactile visual experiences. |
