My email: shamil.Khairov@gmail.com

Returns (the exhibtion). Video by Nikolay Shilov:   

https://vk.com/shilov43?z=video466032650_456239235%2F8adf875936c71263ab%2Fpl_wall_46603265

Shamil Khairov is lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow (Subjects: Russian language and culture, Slavonic languages). He has been invited to give lectures on Russian visual culture and photography in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Poland, Finland and the Czech Republic.            Member of the Union of Photographic Artists of the Russian Federation (from 2002). Themes in his photography include: the Russian countryside, provincial life, Karelia, Petrozavodsk, Mordovia.                                       

Solo exhibitions: Quiet Russia, Edinburgh, Scotland (2009); Quiet Life, Ostrava, Czech Republic (2012); Simple Things, Germersheim, Germany (2013); Beyond the Seven Rivers, Warsaw, Poland (2014); Letters from Russia, Leuven, Belgium (2016), Returns / Возвращения, Petrozavodsk, Russia (with Alexei Savkin, 2019).

When I was eight, I first saw how my older sister printed photographs at home.  It was all there; the night, an unusual environment, the smell of the chemicals, the red light.  The magical appearance of pictures was exciting since. Art photography came to me when I arrived in Petrozavodsk to teach Linguistics at the pedagogical university.  The nature of Karelia and the reserved character of Petrozavodsk fascinated me instantly.  Every summer, I would go with students to the Russian North, on dialectological expeditions.  During this time I felt the magic of the colours of a summer’s ‘white’ nights. 

Many photographs on this website have been exhibited at the the "Returns" exhition in Petrozavodsk, Russia (1-30  August 2019, shared with Alexey Savkin). The ‘returns’ of the exhibition’s title are markers, both of points in space and of important moments in life’s journey, in the exhibitors' understanding of themselves and the world around them. After all, any photograph that for whatever reason has been selected by the author for life as a print is in itself an act of returning to the point in time and space when the shutter button was pressed. The print returns the photographer to that point, but as a different person, while also re-connecting them with their former self. And so connections start to vibrate between the two, creating new meanings and evaluations. The viewer has their own reading of these connections, based on their own experience and imagination. Either they resonate, or, if there is too wide a gulf in values and experiences, that channel remains blocked.