The Artists Who Came in from the Cold: From Siberia to the Stanford Hotel, brings together three photographers who over a span of 10 years photographed in different parts of Russia. Seen together, their black and white images create an elliptical link between a village in Siberia in winter, a beach in Kaliningrad, an apartment in St. Petersburg, and a hotel room in New York. They speak of the breadth of a culture but also the ways in which outsiders to a culture thread impressions and encounters into an evocative tapestry of asso- ciations, both personal and mythic. The three photographers--French, Brazilian, and American--separately traveled to different parts of Russia and later saw each other’s work in New York. All having a strong relationship to cinema, and close relationships with each other, they accentuate the use of black and white grainy effects, mood, and atmosphere to create a cinematic tension in their documentary work.

Creating a strong connection between these three perspectives, The Artists Who Came In From the Cold combines a sense of objective documentary description with subjective, diaristic narrative, and because of the shared use of 35mm and black and white film, the photographs cohere into a consistent view of a confounding culture. The title of the exhibition is taken from John LeCarré’s novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, about a British agent in Berlin during the Cold War, made into a Hollywood film in 1965.

The French photographer Emile Hyperion Dubuisson, (who moved to New York in 2006 after years in Paris working as a cinematographer with some of the leading directors of the new French cinema), went to Siberia when he was 18 years old in the winter of 93-94 with a French-Belarussian film crew to make a documentary about a remote village in the middle of winter. As soon as he got there, he became ill, so instead of working with the crew to make the film, he took his own still photos of village life as he recuperated. When he got back to Paris and developed the film, he accidentally underdeveloped his negatives, and they were too thin to print; he gave them up as lost and never thought about them again until 15 years later when, now living in New York and working as a still photographer, he tried to recover them through digital scanning and printing. From this vantage point in time, the “lost” but rescued material offered many surprises—basically, the charm and beauty of his young, wide-eyed perspective on a world completely different from his own—such as pictures of a woman proudly displaying a big fish, villagers skinning reindeer in the snow, and an omnious picture of a helicopter descending into the village during a snowstorm.

Allen Frame, one of Dubuisson’s photo teachers at the International Center of Photography in New York, admired this Siberian work, and encouraged Dubuisson as he compiled the images into a book and included them in various group exhibitions. Frame's own aesthetic for many years involved using high-speed black and white film and overdeveloping it to emphasize the grain. He had also been to Russia, four times, from 2000-2002, teaching photography workshops to college students and presenting a photo slide projection project about AIDS in various cities. In New York, in 2004, he had the chance to meet and photograph some young Russian video artists in their rooms at the Stanford Hotel - including Evgenii Palamarchuk- who were showing their videos at the contemporary art space Art in General, brought to New York by CEC Artslink, which had sponsored Frame’s own travels in Russia.

Mauro Restiffe, from Sao Paulo, studied at the International Center of Photography in '94/'95, and went to St. Petersburg in '95 twice, first with his Russian girlfriend, then later that year by himself after they had broken up. The pictures that he made there, still lifes, environments, and portraits in her mother’s apartment, proved to be seminal in his body of work, with their interest in the role of portraiture as artifact, icon, and memento. After creating a signature style of large-scale grainy images made from 35mm negatives that have been presented internationally, he returns to these early, intimate, small-scale photographs that reference a specific time in his life and his awakening to the content that arises with the intersection of private and public space, the social and the political.