Kovrigin Vadim Valerievich General work experience

Kovrigin, Vadim Vladimirovich (1901-1962) - Soviet photographer, a prominent representative of the avant-garde photo, originally from the Donbass. Vadim was born and raised in a noble family. Received a good education. Father, Kovrigin, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1875-1951) - a well-known mining engineer in the fourth generation, mother - Emma, ​​Maria Vladimirovna. The family of the future photographer moved to Irkutsk, after his father, a major mining engineer, received the position of a gold mining manager in the Far Eastern Territory. There Vadim graduated from the Nerchinsk real school and three courses from the Irkutsk State University. The revolution found Vadim Kovrigin in Vladivostok, an attempt to go to Paris to become an artist ended in failure. During the Civil War, Vadim Kovrigin went through both an execution with ramrods and a severe bullet wound to the lung, but survived and found himself in a new civilian life.

From the autobiography of Vadim Kovrigin:

“He joined the local detachment of the Red Guard to fight the counter-revolutionary Cossacks. After the overthrow of Soviet power in Siberia (Kolchakism), he sat with his parents in the Nerchinsk and Chita prisons. At the beginning of 1919, he fled with them to Irkutsk to avoid mobilization, entered the ensign school, from there he volunteered for the fleet (sailor), then fled to Andreev's partisan detachment near Nikolsk-Ussuriysky. After the overthrow of Kolchak, he served in the Red Navy. At the end of 1920, he moved to the newly formed Soviet republic in Blagoveshchensk, where he joined the ranks of the Red Army. In 1921 he joined the CPSU(b). He served in the Red Army until 1925, worked mainly as a teacher in military schools in Chita and Irkutsk. After demobilization, he worked as a journalist in Irkutsk newspapers until 1929.

In 1930, Vadim Kovrigin moved to Moscow, where he got a job at the Evening Moscow newspaper as a feature writer and photojournalist. Vadim followed the path of many famous Soviet representatives of art: he moved from the provinces to the capital, where life is seething and filled with creative communication, where self-realization and inner growth are incommensurable with the previous opportunities.

He married a third marriage to Evgenia Konstantinovna Cheremnykh. The young family settled in Trekhprudny Lane, not far from the Patriarch's Ponds, in an apartment received by K. M. Cheremnykh, who worked at Gudok, and a proofreader at the 16th printing house. The brother of E. K. Cheremnykh, Mikhail Mikhailovich Cheremnykh, was a well-known artist, Mayakovsky's colleague in the "Windows of GROWTH". I got into the creative environment of the "left" movements: after all, Mayakovsky, Briki, Malevich, Ignatovichi, Rodchenko and others were there from time to time. In the early 1930s, Kazimir Malevich painted a portrait of Kovrigin, which was exhibited at the artist's last lifetime exhibition. E.K. Cheremnykh was an actress with Meyerhold, passionately loved the theater and infected Vadim Kovrigin with this passion for life. Kovrigin, despite the lack of art education, very quickly became “one of his own” in the cultural environment of that time, obviously, this was facilitated by a high level of general education, creative talent, remarkable susceptibility, and most importantly, the high technical thoroughness of everything that the photographer undertook.

On the instructions of the editors, Kovrigin travels a lot. The geography of his trips and shooting subjects are very diverse: Karelia and Moldova, Odessa region and Magnitogorsk, rural life and industrialization, industry leaders and private, "home shooting". Working in a newspaper creates a certain rhythm of life and has a special specificity: the reader needs to present a fact, while “beautifulness” is often of secondary importance. However, the master surprisingly managed to preserve and fill the seemingly reportage pictures with artistic content. Kovrigin created his own special photographic style. Extremely demanding of himself, he was not shy or ashamed to learn from fellow photographers. His acquaintance with Alexander Rodchenko in 1934, the processing of the experience of pictorial photography, the application of the achievements of painting, the ability to rethink for himself and mastery determined the further fate of the master.

In 1933-1936, Kovrigin worked as a photo editor for a newspaper on the Moscow-Volga channel and as a photographer for the magazine USSR in Construction, the main propaganda publication of the 1930s. Like many Soviet people, he sincerely believed in many slogans of that time, "reforging", "re-educating" prisoners by labor, turning them into "builders of socialism".

In 1937 he returned to Moscow, continued to work in the "Evening Moscow", was in charge of the editorial board of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition and the New York exhibition "Soyuzfoto". The photographer Kovrigin, who lived in the hard times of the 1930s and 1950s, was a gambling man. Loved to experiment. With creativity, with life and even with your own name. According to the memoirs of his colleague Yevgeny Kassin, he was presented to different people in different ways: Vadim Vladimirovich, Vladimir Vadimovich, and even very relevantly: Vladimir Vladimirovich. What his real name was, the KGB knew, because the photographer Kovrigin worked in the TASS photo chronicle.

In a special row is a series of his photographs of bottling and rolling of steel at Azovstal, which Kovrigin carried out simultaneously with Boris Ignatovich. Monumentality and expression, dynamics and a sense of physical power turn photographs into a work of art of a transtemporal category. In the same period of time, a portrait of Boris Ignatovich was also made. The author, in our opinion, managed not only to convey the personality of a close friend, his character, mood, profession, but also the creative credo of his colleague. The meeting with Vera Mukhina at the end of the 1930s and subsequent work with the sculptor show how Kovrigin gets used to the image of the model being shot and her work. The photographer manages not only to convey the author's vision of the sculpture, but also to fill it with his own, Kovriginsky meaning. The viewer first perceives through a fragment a certain essence of the entire work of art, and then suddenly finds himself in the atmosphere of the very era of greatness and catastrophes, where the fate and free will of an individual is insignificant and meaningless. However, the master in his work uses another very important element - the road. And this unexpectedly completely changes the meaning of photography - hope, movement and ... the frailty of everything that exists - a mixture of genres and moods ... landscape and still life, objectivity and abstraction ...

TASS photographer V.V. Kovrigin was famous. During the war years, Kovrigin made a photo story about Captain Fisanovich's submarine, which sailed in the Barents Sea. Other themes are "everyday life of great construction projects", Soviet agricultural pastorals, portraits of leaders and order bearers. Favorite camera V.V. Kovrigin was a "watering can".

Creative method of V.V. Kovrigin can be compared with the pictorial tradition that the avant-garde masters and their students professed when the avant-garde came to an end for natural (fatigue of style) and unnatural (state struggle against formalism) reasons. Kovrigin was friends with Alexander Rodchenko. But by the time they met in 1936 on the Moscow-Volga Canal, from where both reported on the “great construction of socialism,” Rodchenko himself had largely departed from experimental aesthetics with plot minimalism, dashing diagonal angles, and space packaged in sections. According to Rodchenko's grandson, photography researcher Alexander Lavrentiev, the great grandfather from the second half of the 1930s, contrary to his former "instantaneity", dreams of photography - the likeness of a large easel painting, with a classical dramaturgy of the plot, the quality of an exhibition "made".

Kovrigin thinks in a similar way. When you look at his “Orden-bearer of the Kholmogory tribal state farm Tasya Prokofiev”, the peasants are resurrected not by Malevich, but rather by Venetsianov: everything is airy, soft, velvety, lyrical. Even the cabbages at Kovrigin's do not struggle with space, do not squeeze it out with their mass, but bask in it in a friendly way, drawing the eye into the luminous warm haze-sfumato. The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson ingeniously "told" about such a world that is kind to the eye of the viewer in his photo essays. Being short in stature, Kovrigin showed extraordinary ingenuity: he invented and designed an extraordinary tripod-ladder, which he made from an ordinary film tripod. When circumstances demanded, the resourceful reporter climbed up the tripod like a ladder and could shoot freely without fear that one of his colleagues, guards or participants in the event would obscure the frame.

During World War II, Vadim Vladimirovich Kovrigin was drafted into the army, served in a motorized rifle regiment of the NKVD of the USSR, was demobilized for health reasons in 1942, and in 1943 became a photojournalist in the Northern Fleet. In the late 1940s, Vadim Kovrigin worked on the filming of official events, including the filming of Joseph Stalin. Life often ruthlessly experimented with Kovrigin himself. In April 1950, Vadim Kovrigin was arrested due to a mistake by a laboratory assistant who mixed up the negatives. In 1950, during the official shooting of Stalin at the All-People's Elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the shadow of the visor of the cap fell on the face of the General Secretary. The photo was corrupted. Kovrigin made a photomontage using another photograph, which was often practiced then in the publishing business. After reshooting and retouching, we got a good shot, but the laboratory assistants mixed up the negatives and sent the image with traces of editing to the press agency - this photo was published in Life magazine with the appropriate comments. The photographer was accused of plotting against the leader. He was saved from execution by chance - in the investigator's office there was a photograph of I. Stalin, taken by V. Kovrigin. When the interrogated man reported this to the investigator who tortured him, he did not believe it and called the TASS photo chronicle, and the colleague, despite the possible sad consequences, confirmed the authorship. For an unsuccessful picture of Stalin at the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1950 - exile to Kazakhstan (Dzhambul) for two years. The arrest and the events that followed it had a serious impact on Vadim Vladimirovich: he withdrew and reduced his circle of contacts, despite the prospects that were tempting later, in every possible way avoided close relations with the authorities. Of those who have always been dear to the photographer throughout his colorful life, we can name A. Rodchenko (Rodcha), V. V. Toporkov (Kotik), S. M. Tretyakov, Boris and Olga Ignatovich, V. Karnaukhov (Chernomor) , sister Olga's husband, the Cheremny family and, of course, his children and wives.

After the exile, he worked as a staff photographer for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VDNKh), and in 1956 Vadim Kovrigin was rehabilitated and reinstated at work in the TASS photo chronicle. In the 1950s, Kovrigin was fond of the work of a Frenchman who was filming in the USSR and seemed to be talking to him with his own works.

Back in the 30s, Vadim Kovrigin began to photograph Moscow and the Moscow region, after the war and exile - this is one of the photographer's favorite topics. He loves and feels space. For Kovrigin, Moscow is a city in which there are two equal components - people and architecture. Sometimes they intersect and interact, and sometimes they live in their own parallel worlds. In 1957, an album with his photographs "Moscow" with a magnificent panorama was released, which remarkably echoes Cartier-Bresson's "Moscow". On the slope of his life, fate gave the photographer a trip to Paris and London. He died in 1962 and was buried in the Donskoy Monastery.

In July 1938, Vadim Kovrigin, together with a large group of Soviet photographers, participated in a photo exhibition in Lithuania. After rehabilitation in 1956, Kovrigin did not receive a single lifetime solo exhibition. There was only one posthumous - in the early sixties. Then they forgot about Kovrigin for a long time. The exhibition at EKArtBureau is the first return of a photographer to Russia of the new millennium. Thanks to the professionalism of the curator Faina Balakhovskaya, the atmosphere is built very subtly, in a soft stylization of "trellis" photo expositions of the first half of the last century. The exhibition was organized as part of the Moscow Photo Biennale. And without it, the Biennale would be like aspic without horseradish or a shot of vodka without a lemon wedge.

In 2004, he graduated from the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University with a degree in Cultural Studies and History, with a qualification of a teacher of cultural studies and history.

In 2012 he graduated from the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University with a degree in Jurisprudence, qualification - a lawyer.

In 2008, he became a candidate of pedagogical sciences, having defended his dissertation on the topic “Reflection of the history of the Second World War in the content of domestic and foreign school history education.”

Held positions: Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Social Technologies of the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University.

Since 2015 - Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and Sociology of the Russian University of Economics. G.V. Plekhanov.