Anatoly Rahimbaev - Photographic Art from Uzbekistan

Exhibition: December 2003 - February 2004

Anatoly Rahimbaev (b. 1957) is a freelance photographer who developed a professional career in advertising and journalism. Like most art photographers working in the former Soviet Union, he did not study photography in school. Rahimbaev initially studied geology, began his photographic work in 1985, and now works at Business Vestik Vostok, a Tashkent newspaper.

Rahimbaev’s work is both socially critical and artistically demanding. His work may be seen as a reaction to the clichéd sentimentality of the Soviet photography of the past seventy years. There are no more armies of peasants and workers marching towards socialism; instead we see true individuals, each with a wary consciousness that they are facing an unpredictable, modern world. The new photography is refreshingly personal - meaningful as an artistic creation - rather than an expression of ideology.