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THE WONDER OF ADVENTURES FROM THE ICE POLES TO THE SAVANAH SERGEY YASTRZHEMBSKIY PHOTOGRAPHER & DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER by Paola Viola
Still successful the work by Sergey Yastrzhembskiy, born in Moscow December 4, 1953, who began his career as a journalist, diplomat, and political figure. He served as the Russian Ambassador to Slovakia, and worked as a newsman under President Boris Yeltsin, and from 2000 and 2008 we saw him as Special Advisor to President Vladimir Putin for UE relations. Along with his political life, and even before it (we are speaking about 20 years ago) there has always been love for photography, which he cultivated under the tutelage of the master Lev Melikhov.
Sergey Yastzhembskiy says, “Photography is my life, my style and my view of a world I did not create and which I love to explore”. With this though he undertook his artistic pathway as a photographer and a man of great sensitivity, first of all regarding the human being, and consequently, through the images he takes. Tonino Guerra, the great screenwriter, describes his photos “aero-impressionist”: “this works Sergey does, so explosive and full of distances that evoke magic in what they represent, leave me in awe, the way an old farmer might feel beholding his vineyard in October, full of red leaves”. From 2006 until today, 7 monographs have been published about him.
The last one is entitled “Feeling Elements” (present in all the best bookstores), a gathering of photos taken by him from the sky (by plane, hot air balloon, small aircrafts) that constitute the four natural elements – water, air, earth, fire. Nature is shown to us rapt in benign ecstasy, in a beautiful, sovereign calm, seemingly unaware of the threats imposed on it by humankind’s so-called “progress”. The gaze from above replaces a frontal one, so classic in photography, thus feeding a sense of exodus, out-of- placeless, of an enigma profoundly linked to contemporary feelings.