Sergei Pavlov, Mountain (2025)15 Images
At first glance, Mountain – a new book of photography by Sergei Pavlov – is minimal, spartan even. The artist’s name doesn’t appear on the cover, and the photographs – which take Pavlov’s partner as their subject – are untitled and often present fragments. A close-up of his face in profile, part of it consumed by shadow; beads of water and sweat along his back; a nude standing on the beach, looking away from the camera with eyes towards the horizon as the sun sets. Over email, Pavlov tells me about the change in his process as he began working with his partner instead of other people: “Before, it was more photographic work, then I tried to fit life around it. But now, I’m happy that there’s a sense of unity between making images [that] can happen while trying to work out these more mundane things.”
Mountain presents not only a multi-faceted portrait of Pavlov’s partner, but also the artist’s own philosophy about the relationship between art and life. “When I think about what makes a beautiful life, it’s always something more connected to nature, simplicity, and space.” These three ideas occur throughout Pavlov’s new publication, from the mountain itself in the first images to the interplay between light and shadow that gives the work its dynamism.
Pavlov’s photographs, autobiographical and monochromatic as they are, immediately bring to mind the work of artists like Peter Hujar, Herve Guibert and Nan Goldin. Pavlov is reticent to put too much weight on the labels autobiographical and queer when considering both the work of these influences, and his own practice. “To me, their work represents the work itself; it has the nature of standing on its own,” placing a greater emphasis on the eye and sensibilities of the photographers rather than the genres – formal and otherwise – that the work might belong to. “What the images of such photographers […] do to me is transmit the transcendent nature of their gays, which to me means that there is more than one way of looking.”
For Pavlov, it seems important that this way of looking is able to contain multitudes, doing more than just presenting a concrete vision of a person and the world around them. “I think there is too much knowing,” Pavlov suggests, an impulse that’s too quick to fill in gaps, sacrificing possibility for certainty. For Pavlov, this idea is, above all else, lonely. “I always want to leave space for people to define the work for themselves,” before asking me, “what is more interesting: what has happened, or what will be defined from it?” It makes sense, then, that there would be no straightforward definitions offered from the work in Mountain: the body, nature, what it means to capture a loved one; all of these ideas animate Pavlov photography, but Mountain doesn’t give a singular meaning to them. Even the book’s central figure seems to transform when captured in different contexts, places, tricks of light. In one image, he stands – captured in a tight close-up, his chest and above in frame – with housing and a brutalist block of flats behind him, worlds away from the pastoral images on the beach.
“The book is very narrated, of course,” Pavlov tells me; a byproduct of taking photographs from an extended period of time and piecing them together, an act that requires simplification, “to create a sense of understandability and unity,” a shorthand for the kind of life that he might want to live. But even in this act that might threaten to flatten nuance, Pavlov is searching for nuance. “I feel it is a very idealised version of the life I would like to live more, but maybe in the expression of that life […] is a very real, dear, and intimate utopia and dream to me, and is expressed in the book in its raw form.” Pavlov and I go back and forth on the definitions and connotations of these words; each of us thinking that raw is unnecessarily associated with ideas of violence or shock. But in Mountain, the idea of something raw is instead something that exists in spaces between definition, between utopian dreams and everyday life.
Pavlov argues that the beauty of many photographs is “a possibility to interact with something that is suggested.” Through its minimal presentation, and the way in which Pavlov’s subject transforms through the locations in which he’s photographed, Mountain creates a suggestion: an idea of a kind life and intimacy that one might want to gesture towards. Even the mountain that gives the collection its title – appearing in the background of the first photographs in the book – is far off in the distance, behind mist and threatening to disappear beyond the horizon. It isn’t something to scale or conquer – this language, again, might be too violent – but something to reach towards with a gentle, curious hand.
