Interview with Gregori Maiofis

When Gregori Maiofis invited Funt the Bear into his studio for a photo shoot, he didn’t know what to expect.   Funt is a BEAR, after all, and who could predict how it would react to the lights and camera paraphernalia, let alone if it would cooperate with the vision Maiofis had for the session.

“He was a brilliant actor, “Maiofis remembers,  “And a lot of things that he did for me, for my compositions, are things that probably no other bear would be able to perform.  He posed with the ballerina, and with the harp, and a piano.  These were things I wanted to try because, well, you never know-- you might get lucky.  Or it may all fail.  But I got really lucky that day because when you look closely you can see the way his claws touch the strings of the harp.  It’s unbelievable how realistic it looks in the photograph I call, ‘Funt with Harp.’   That’s really a piece of photographic luck.

Maiofis comes from a distinguished family of Russian artists.  His father is a famous Russian book illustrator and his grandparents were respected architects.  He grew up painting and drawing, and his father introduced him to printmaking at an early age.  He now works in the expansive studio that has been used by his artistic family for forty years in central St. Petersburg.

“I didn’t have any experience with photography until I was maybe thirty,” Maiofis says.  “Before that I was doing lots of other things, all the traditional art forms from an early age.  My first exhibitions consisted mostly of paintings.   And as an artist I work a lot of various mediums, especially with my latest works. I’ve been combining photography with printmaking and painting.  I’m self-taught for my photography and have been doing staged work now for a long time now, since the turn of the century.

One of his first photographic endeavors, and one that brought almost immediate attention in Russian photographic circles, was a series of photographs inspired by classic proverbs, many by the famous 19th century writer Ivan Krylov.  (His statue is shown, from behind, in the work titled ‘Coldron and Pot,’)  Krylov tells one story about a visitor to a natural history museum who spends his whole time examining all the insects and other small objects.  The visitor then meets a friend who asks, ‘did you get a chance to see the elephant?  The man was so absorbed in the small details in the museum that he missed the largest object in the collection.

“That’s the story I remember from my childhood,” says Maiofis.  “But I have a slightly different fable to tell in my photograph  ‘Curios, 2000’.  There is a place in St Petersburg where we have a cluster of many museums.  There used to be a Navy museum, which held our military history with boats and canons and all that kind of stuff.  They once had a small exhibition, during the Sovient era, where there were objects dealing with Nazi atrocities.  When I was a child I remember seeing an object I couldn’t believe was possible; a piece of human skin that had been part of some horrible Nazi experiment.

That image remained in Maiofis’ memory.  When he began working on his series of proverbs, he wanted to recreate the feeling of a natural history museum, with insects and butterflies, but he also wanted the juxtaposition of that startling piece of human skin.  It took some major detective work to track down that long forgotten exhibit, and when the museum curators located that skin, Maiofis was struck by the shape, which resembled a butterfly. He set about arranging different elements to tell his story, including a painting he made of Pavlov’s dog.

“So this is the first piece from my ‘Fables” series,” he says.  “Now you probably look at it in a slightly different way?  I think the way art is interpreted, and the way art is read, really tells you more about the person who does the interpretation than it does about the artist. This topic is obviously important to all artists and is a general problem when we exhibit our work.  How do people read a photograph and interpret what the photographer is trying to say?”

Maiofis was lucky to find a bear tamer who was interested in trying out some ideas for his photography series.  They had maybe seven or eight shooting sessions with Funt the Bear.

“The first time I met him I told him that I have this idea of bringing a bear to my studio, and I wanted to put him on a bed.  I wanted to have a woman right next to him.  This wasn’t the first bear tamer I approached, but he was the first one willing to experiment and help me achieve my vision.

Funt and his handler had to take the elevator to get to the upstairs photo studio. Maiofis had absolutely no idea of what might happen: whether or not it was possible to pose the bear, or whether or not it was safe or dangerous. For the first studio shoot they did two compositions of Funt on the on the bed, and also the one where he’s sitting in front of the mirror, looking at his reflection, seemingly ruminating on what a fine looking bear he is.

The second session with Funt was Maiofis’ favorite, where Funt is reading a book by Lenin.  He’s not wearing his muzzle and looks totally engrossed in the book.  But that photo was shot in color and needs color to work, so won’t be included in this portfolio.  The proverb that Maiofis was trying elucidate goes back to a Soviet Proverb: ‘Lenin’s science makes hands and mind stronger.’

“After a few sessions,” Maiofis says,  “I began to realize what Funt could do, and I thought I could work him into my series of proverbs. There is a Jewish proverb that translates something like: ‘In time, even a bear may be taught to dance.’  By this time I knew what Funt could do; that he could hold a pose while standing.  I thought if I could find a ballerina doing something similar, I would really have something. Finding a willing ballerina was much harder than finding a performing bear.  St Petersburg has a lot of ballet: they are world famous for it.  But it was very difficult to penetrate that circle, so to speak.”

When the day came to make the image they had much difficulty trying to get Funt to repeat the movements of the ballerina.  But they compromised on what Maiofis had in mind by trying something else, and turning Funt into a spectator. They put Funt on a chair which made him the audience as the ballerina started to dance in front of him.  “A lot of people ask if I used a bear costume, or if it was photoshopped,” Maiofis laments,  “Which is always the problem when you create an unusual image in reality, in your camera.  Well it’s not photoshopped.  This was 100% the real deal. There is a negative to prove this.

“That photograph would be very very difficult, if not impossible, to make in America,” Maiofis says, “Because of liability issues.  So you really have to take advantage of those opportunities you may have in the places you work.   From that point of view I would rather not call myself a ‘Russian’ photographer, but rather an artist working in St. Petersburg.   It would be very difficult to have something like that constructed or organized in any other town, even in Russia.”

Where do his ideas come from?  “I don’t have a secret room where I have all these ideas on shelves, where I can just go in a pick one out.  It doesn’t work like that.  In many cases, I do something because I have an idea or an image living in my mind and I feel it must be fulfilled.  It is as if something is knocking on the door.  It wants to become real, so to speak.

“First of all, I come up with something in my imagination.  I have to come up with a composition, which I usually sketch out so I know exactly what I want to make happen.  Or at least make it close as I can to what I first imagined.  By the way, composition, in my opinion, is the most important part of any visual art.  That’s what painting and photography have in common.  They may be different ways of extracting an image, but conceptualizing the composition is the most important part.”

Then Maiofis must find some way to put that composition together in front of the camera lens. He often paints a background that will suit his needs, and then begins assembling the photographic pieces that will work together to tell his story.  It is a combination of photography and staging.  He compares himself to a film director and a collage artist trying to build something that will end up in the camera.

“The last part,” Maiofis says,  “Happens when you attempt translating your idea into an object, or piece of art to be exhibited to an audience. My very favorite medium is bromoil transfer, which allows me to have works that are a combination of painting and photography, both in theory and in practical terms.  This might be an image, which is made on canvas with oil colors, but it is still based on the photographic process.  I have built myself a large printing press to make those bromo transfers, because I make prints that are very very large—Some that are 75 inches tall.

“If you are lucky, and have done a really good job at all of those different steps, you might end up having something that you can take to an exhibition, and that others might appreciate as well.  That is an extreme pleasure; when all of these disparate elements work together to make a meaningful work of art.”