Bio

“when you experience a world of culture you start feeling a desire for self-expression and you want to do something yourself”

Yuri Toropstov is a Russian Photographer who has worked on the theme of family. Yury was born in 1974 in a small village called Vladistov, at the time a special administrative region of to U.S.S.R, near the border of China and North Korea. Yuri is of Eastern Siberian origins, and grew up in the Soviet Union until the collapse of communism in Russia in 1991. Growing as an ethic minority in Communist Russia gave Yury a unique perspective of life. Yuri’s father died when Yuri was  1 year old, and he was brought up by his mother.

Yury left Russia in 1998 to study at the New School for Social Research in New York, winning a prestigious scholarship to study project management. He was inspired by the social changes taking place in Russia at the time. Yury travelled to America working as a translator of an Non-Profit Organisation. This trip greatly inspired him, broadening his mind to different cultures and ways of life as he states in a JEP newspaper newspaper article, “when you experience a world of culture you start feeling a desire for self-expression and you want to do something yourself”. At age 30, Yuri decided he wanted to become a photographer, and so he left his job working at the United Nations and became an assistant for a fashion photographer.

Since then Toropstov has been working as a documentary photographer based Paris. He has completed various projects, made into slide-shows, films and books. His projects include ‘Deleted  Scene’, ‘Why was I born in Russia’, ‘Define Retribution’ and ‘Marylin and I’. In 2014 Yuri worked for 6 months in Jersey as the ‘Archisle International Photographer in Residence’. This 6 month project was finalised  with an exhibition entitled ‘Fairyland’.

Yury’s ‘Fairyland’ Exhibition Display

Video of  Yury’s project ‘Marylin and I’. Yury tends to make video’s summarising all of his projects

Deleted Scene

“I never knew my father. There is not much one can do about that, you just have to find a way to live with it”

 

Deleted Scene is a photo-book by Toroptsov, recently completed. It is a collection of images, documenting the isolated and remote region  of Eastern-Siberia. In this project Yury combines a combination of landscapes which reflect the beauty of the region, along with subtle close-up images, giving a glimpsing perspective into the communities that live their. Deleted Scene is also a personal journey for Yury. His father died when he was only one year old and so at the time he knew virtually nothing about him as Yury reflects, “his untimely death turned him into an abstract character existing on the verge of oblivion”. Yury used this opportunity to learn something about the father he never knew, studying where his father grew up, incorporating old archival images of him into the photo-book.

The story also focuses on the chance meeting between Japapese film-maker Akira Kurosawa and Yury’s parents when he visited the village to shoot his Oscar-winning film ‘Dersu Uzala’. By sheer chance, Yury’s parents appeared on a small section of the film.

There is no text to this narrative, and so it is up to the reader to make up their own interpretation of Yury’s father based on the images they are presented with. I like this series a lot because it documents a very personal journey of the photographer to document a man he never got to know. The images ‘Deleted Scene’ are in many ways a collection of self-portraits that show Yury’s background, where he is from and his influences.

My initial impression of this story is that what is revealed is only very subtle. This idea reflects on the fact that there may still be a lot more that Yury does not know about his father, hinting a sombre reflection that the book can never be fully revealing as he will never meet  his father in person, but instead is a brief insight done with the limited resources Yury had to work with.

I like how Yuri has incorporated his family archive in this series. I find that he did it in a way that does not limit the narrative to focus entirely on the past but instead balances Yury’s search to find out about his father both through historical account as well as through observation of his present day findings.

Studying this book and Yury’s personal story has greatly inspired me in exploring my own theme of family. It is important to make my own work meaningful and personal to me, even if that means exploring subjects which are potentially difficult and emotional. I will search for a topic point I feel I can relate to personally, like Yury has done in this series.

Link to the  series on Yury’s blog: http://toroptsov.com/en/projects/deletedscene.htm