Alexey Titarenko was born in 1962 in Leningrad. He began to get interested in photography in 1970, at the same time he joined the photo club of the Kirov Recreation Center, where he got acquainted with the techniques of film development and photo printing. In 1978, Titarenko became a member of the independent photo club “Mirror” and held his first solo exhibition.
In 1983, he received a master’s degree in cinematographic and photographic art from the Leningrad Institute of Culture.
In 1988, a series of collages and photomontages by Titarenko entitled “Nomenclature of Signs” was presented in Leningrad. In 1989, she was included in the exposition of the exhibition of Soviet artists “Fotostroika”, which was held in the United States.
Alexey Titarenko is one of the founders in 1989 of the Ligovka art group and the Ligovka – 99 photographic exhibition hall, as well as the S. Yurok Charitable Foundation for the Promotion of Classical Musical Culture (1995). Since 1997, he has been a member of the Union of Artists of Russia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the photographer released several series of works about the difficult state of the Russian people throughout the 20th century. To illustrate the connections between the present and the past, he created powerful metaphorical works by introducing long shutter speeds and deliberate camera movement into street photography. The most famous series can be called “City of Shadows”. Inspired by the works of Dmitry Shostakovich, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Sergei Eisenstein, Alexey Titarenko created unique prints of images of St. Petersburg.
Alexey Titarenko creates each print manually in his darkroom, experimenting with film development techniques and techniques, thereby creating a rich, refined range of tones that makes each work unique.
Alexey Titarenko’s works are in the collections of major Russian, European and American museums, including the collection of the State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the Jetty Museum (Los Angeles), the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Fine Arts (Houston), the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), the European House of Photography (Paris) and others.
