Slussarev’s first photographs in the early 1960s already declared the creation of his own style, fundamentally opposed to the principles of Socialist Realism dominating Soviet photography at that time. His fascination with the formal questions of photography and problems of light and composition determined his creative path, while he also searched for metaphysical content and transcendental origins. It was Slussarev who first devised the term ‘metaphysical photography’ in the 1970s. Curiously enough, a school of meta-metaphorical poets with similar aims appeared during the same period (Alexei Parshikov, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexander Yeremenko). Minimalism, an interest in the disintegrated structures and textures that filled Soviet reality and passed unnoticed by ideologised Soviet man, and extreme intimacy yet philosophical generalisation were the chief characteristics of Alexandre Slussarev’s work in the 1960s to late 1970s. Windows, Slussarev’s favourite subject, became a focus of unofficial Soviet photography. Incidentally, these were the years when important artists of the Russian underground such as Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, and Oleg Vasiliev also produced series of compositions related to windows and the problem of escape. In the completely closed Soviet Union, sealed from the outside world by an Iron Curtain, the problem of finding a way out became the major existential issue. For Slussarev the point of egress is light.

Olga Sviblova