Evgeny Mokhorev - the fragile edge of youth

Fragile

Fragile is a film about photography in the post-Soviet era in Saint Petersburg. It offers a view of the city’s bitter elegance, its inhabitants, and the delicate, graceful models of Evgeny Mokhorev.

The film follows Evgeny Mokhorev as he photographs people on the streets of Saint Petersburg, working in the tradition of Brassaï. It also delves into the hidden aspects of the photographer’s interaction with his models. The film presents several series of Mokhorev’s outstanding and vivid photographs depicting children and teenagers of Saint Petersburg.

Watch Fragile, part 1

Watch Fragile, part 2

Like the artist’s work, Fragile is an unsettling and at times disturbing film. As you watch Mokhorev walk around a house on a bitterly cold St Petersburg winter’s day, waking up the children who are his models that day, you have to wonder how willing they are or whether they are being used or exploited. As the film continues though (and the children wake up) you begin to see them experimenting, testing, trying out ideas with the photographer and Mokhorev’s words begin to make sense:

Now in his 40s, Mokhorev was not alone among the Russian photographers who addressed the despair of people situated on the societal fringes during the waning days of the Soviet regime. Sergey Bratkov, Yuri Mukhin and Nikolay Bakharev documented the ironic and poignant scraps of life that were hidden or banned from official culture.All of them derived from the boom of amateur photography in the post-war communist Soviet Union, and counted Boris Mikhailov’s now-classic images as prototypes.