The main player in all Yuri Rost’s photographs and in everything he writes and says is the individual human being in his immediate environment. Rost’s photographic vision is closely related to the humanist tradition established by well-known post-war photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leonard Freed and Ed van der Elsken. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Cartier-Bresson (1908-2005) selected one of Rost’s photos for inclusion in his last exhibition, Les choix d’Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris, 2003). As a gifted writer and social analyst, Rost is able to give his photographs an extra dimension by writing lengthy literary labels describing and explaining the social context of the person concerned. The forthcoming exhibition at the Hague Museum of Photography will feature 30 black-and-white photographs of this kind: portraits of ordinary and outstanding Russians from the period between 1946 and 1997, as previously published in the 2003 bibliophile edition People. As seen and described by Yuri Rost.
In this exhibition, the photographer/writer focuses on Russian peasants, tramps, actors and academics, treating them all with equal respect. What they all have in common, and what in turn connects the photographer to these ‘human people’, is their ability to marvel at the wonders of everyday life. About Sergei Paradzhanov, for example, photographed in front of his home in 1985, Yuri Rost writes “He and I loved the same woman, and that drew us together. He loved vividly and beautifully. When she fell ill, Paradzhanov sent her a crate of oranges. She had never seen such exotic fruit before, but it was not because she didn’t know how that she didn’t eat them. She laid them out on her windowsills and gazed at the “little suns” that Seriozha had sent her in mid-winter. She admired them and recovered.” With thanks to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Netherlands, the Russian news and information agency NOVOSTI, The Hague and the Public Diplomacy Corps, The Hague.