Mikhail Mikhaltchuk

The beginning (back in 1989) of the program "Mnogoportret" first of all is obliged to the nostalgia on the departing Moscow "kitchen" culture.
Instinctively I have tried to return and to fix the Past - just here I have found my niche in the Present, by restoring for myself a sense and justification of the existential (unfunctional) dialogue. True, the circle of the Dialogue was narrowed down, may be temporarily, down to the art sphere.
First, this intercourse with people interesting to me and liked by me makes nowadays one of the two bases of my art activity. Secondly, purely aesthetic enjoying of the activity above each separate photo. In the long term by this I would like to limit myself. In an ideal there should be a certain fund (collection? A museum?), where I'd put the separate photos with which other people would work, explore them, exhibit them. Now I want only to show potential capabilities of the program.
 I never take photos secretly. I explain to the hero explicitly what I want, I show him already made works, and I ask meeting in quiet situation favorable to slow dialogue (it is desirable tete-a-tete). The precise concept based on the actual interest to the photographed person, the presence of "the photoeye" create intense I'd tell ritual, quasireligious atmosphere. One my acquaintance engaging in martial arts has named our joint experience as a sparring, where the camera was a ritual weapon.
Really in some sense we are equivalent - I and a model, for an outcome is not in a latent image on a photographic film but in some non-material informational-power field. During the shooting the single realized operation is a constant searching of composition equilibrium, on reaching which again and again the button of the shutter is pressed. Here the first part of the activity is finished and the second one begins. In principle, then the different people could be engaged.
Now having a small set of means (very contrast printing, incomplete bleaching with incomplete toning, the printing with a point source of light, and the retouch of technical defects) it is possible to receive a surprising outcome. Really, to reveal that was received at shooting. My already wide experience shows: not
Each negative of successful shooting is successful. Not always is received what expected. But no technical shifts will make the "Mnogoportret" if the dialogue hasn't taken place. However, not running in an extreme, it is better to tell so: the shallower there was a dialogue the more boring photos were and the worse the "Mnogoportret" was.
This new word is compelled as the phenomenon with which I have had confronted had been described nowhere. I have been inventing it long and painfully, and I haven't got accustomed completely to it until now, but I can't do without it any more.
In the beginning I simply communicated and photographed, then made separate prints.
To show them better I usually arranged them on a desktop or on a floor. Sometimes two, three or more prints began to look better together as though helping one another. Not only me but my acquaintances also noticed this - and here already me and them we began to compete who would combine them better. The outcomes charmed: the new
Sum was created, the new measurement. It was not the set of the successful photoportraits, not a photoseries. It was new life with new breathing, motion, color.
I like very much my photos and each one individually - differently what for should I make them. To me very pleasant are the radiant picturesque effect of the texture, the graphicness and the conditionallyness of the "drawing", the subject and the composition if they are successful. But "Mnogoportret" of one person not losing these qualities adds new one more integrally connected, on my sight, with his personality and with our relations.
The internal logic has brought me to the idea of the creation of the general "Mnogoportret", that of the certain circle of the people with a perspective to expand it up to the "Mnogoportret" of the most talented creative people of our time. The problem is difficult and this activity is all in all rated at the infinity. But while with each new person - and frequently by returning to former models - it is possible to me to open for myself something new.