Europe

Victor & Sergiy Kochetov

Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows

1982

Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows, 1982

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region. The protagonist here is not the veteran, but a schoolgirl who shakes his hand. The girl’s appearance, posture, and facial expression are so typical that they border on comical. The intense hues hand coloured by the artists force the Soviet standards for photographic realism to unravel, revealing new, non-verbal meanings that conflict with official Soviet slogans. Working as a photo reporter, the Kochetovs constantly faced that dichotomy of “approved” and “not approved” images. By varying the intensity of coloring and format, the fauvistic colors magnify the plainness of reality and reveal a lyrical side to mundane subjects.

Viktor Kochetov became engaged in photography in 1968 and was also a professional photographer in film and photo laboratories. A significant part of his body of work was created together with his son Sergiy Kochetov. The Kochetovs' art practice is based on cooperation and the mutual exchange of ideas. Their collaborative work shifts focus to scenes of bold, non-staged reality of the late-Soviet to post-Soviet periods. The artists are well-known for their extensive usage of hand-coloring black and white prints, which is rooted in the tradition of "luriki"—enlarged, retouched, and often tinted photographic portraits. Both Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov belong to the Kharkiv School of Photography. Since the mid-70s, the artists associated with this movement have treated photography in an unconventional way, developing personal aesthetics by defying the cultural taboos associated with representation. Their experiments created an iconography that went against the codes of social realism used to glorify the repressive Soviet state.

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Victor & Sergiy Kochetov Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows

Victor & Sergiy Kochetov

Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows