Magnum 75 #21 by Alex Majoli. Moscow, Russia. 2019

In 2019, Alex Majoli traveled to Moscow, Russia to explore the city and document life in the Russian capital. One of the spaces he visited was the Kremlin, and this image above shows Kremlin guards lined up in uniform.

The project was part of the Magnum Live Lab initiative, which invites photographers to spend an intense two-week period in a host city, where they produce new work and take part in daily editing sessions.

For Alex Majoli, the concept of the Live Lab suited him: “To me, the Live Lab is a beautiful idea because we can have long-term projects and edit and re-edit and all this time to think. The fact we don’t have time to think, there’s an immediate response – there’s an essence of truth.”

The photographer used the opportunity to continue exploring the theatrical approach that he had developed over ten years, demonstrated in photobooks such as Scene. Each day, he explored a facet of Moscow that he had a preconception of, ending with an editing session with curator Nina Gomiashvili.

Though he had visited Moscow before his recent trip for the Live Lab, Alex Majoli’s vision of the city had been built through literature and music, and this guided his eye when he hit the streets daily for an intense two-week shooting and editing project. “When I walk in the city of Moscow, I have the Bulgakov black cat in my mind,” he says of imagining every black cat he sees in the city could be the Behemoth from the novel The Master and Margarita.

This mode of exploring, looking for motifs we recognize from our own cultural reference points, is something we all do, says Majoli. “An image will stimulate something already in you and develop,” he explains. “In that sense, art is created in people.”

To find out more about Alex Majoli’s Moscow project, check out the full article here.

To find out more about Alex Majoli, click here