202 - Igor Posner

Igor Posner was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). After the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to California in the early 90s. He studied molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he first started to take pictures and experiment in the darkroom.

Initial infatuation with picture-taking led Igor to explore the silent and haunting experience of walking after dark on the streets of Los Angeles and Tijuana. In a collision between social and typical with personal and psychological, this first series of images “Nonesuch Records” savors the strange solitude of the enigmatic region between California and Mexico; amid the streets, bars, night shelter hotels, and disappearing nocturnal figures.

After 14 years, Igor returned to St. Petersburg in 2006, taking up photography full time, which led to his first book Past Perfect Continuous, published by Red Hook Editions in 2017.

In 2022, Igor published his second monograph, entitled, Cargó. The book is a visual exloration of psychological aspects of migration and the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods based on immigrant communities in North America.

Igor is currently based in New York and in 2021 he joined Brooklyn-based independent publishing company Red Hook Editions as a managing partner. 

Igor’s work has been shown in North America, Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia and he has been a member of Prospekt Photographers since 2011.

In episode 202, Igor discusses, among other things:

• Growing up in St. Petersburg
• Moving to the USA
• Being gifted a camera by his mother
• The New York Photo League
• Shooting in LA
• The ‘language’ he employs intuitively
• Returning to Russia
• First attempts at editing being a ‘total failure’
• Brighton Beach and his second book, Cargo.
• The themes associated with the book
• Commercial work
• Social media

Referenced:

• Anders Petersen
• Michael Ackerman
• Antoine D’agata
• Robert Frank
• Jason Eskenazi

Website | Instagram

“All I wanted to do was go out there and be on the street and just photograph. It was an incredible sense of freedom and liberation for the first time in my life of not going from point A to point B. That’s what photography gives you because you have to be open to everything that’s around you. All of a sudden I started just looking at things. That’s a very trivial thing to say, but to me it felt like something I’ve never experienced before or at least not since my early childhood.”

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