ARTicles vol. 2 i.1: Ken Reynolds, Photographer Extraordinaire

Ken Reynolds is one of the most important photographers to record the riches of Eastern European theater in the last decade. A lifelong resident of England, he had already established an international reputation in the 1980s as a visionary photographer of naturally-occurring color patterns in rusting metals–what he called Secret Landscapes–when, in London in the early 1990s, he came into contact with Lev Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre from St. Petersburg, Russia. As Ken sat transfixed, he imagined the moving images of actors in light as a series of black-and-white photos. His life as an artist changed. This encounter, plus subsequent ones with theaters from Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland, encouraged him to begin photographing theater, specifically from Eastern Europe. A trip to Russia in 1995 brought him into contact with Kama Ginkas and Henrietta Yanovskaya at Moscow’s New Generation Theatre and provided him with his greatest inspiration and most fertile source for material. Ken’s photos of their work–he records their productions not only during rehearsals but also as they grow and change while playing in repertory and on foreign tours–have appeared in publications all over the world, and have been featured in exhibitions in Moscow, Teheran, Tbilisi (Georgia), Bunde (Germany), Gdansk (Poland), and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Ken’s theater photographs–usually, though not exclusively, in black-and-white–are marked by an extraordinary sense of movement and space. His ability to see content in the unusual forms of a blurred hand or a shaded eye do not merely provide representations of dramatic scenes but reveal the underlying meaning that directors and actors impart to their work. His photos hang permanently in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the British Council in Glasgow, the Finnish Opera in Helsinki, the Andrei Tarkovsky Museum and the New Generation Theatre in Moscow.

By John Freedman