John Peter Askew, Cherries and Apricots 2007

With an essay by Elena Zaytseva

Luminous and unassuming, this is my favourite photograph in the show. I love it for its rich colours and bright golden light, but also for something else that I can’t quite put into words. It is hard to believe now, but this work only narrowly avoided being not included in the exhibition at Pushkin House. Any show is a matter of choice as only a fraction of what the artist produces goes on display - John Peter Askew amassed some 20,000 negatives for the project ‘We’, enough for hundreds of exhibitions, and each of them would tell a slightly different story. When we were looking at ‘Cherries and Apricots’, on a sunny winter’s day in the artist’s studio, it was in a form of a small  digital copy that looked humble and demure. It was only something about the clarity of its composition, a circle, slightly off centre, that captured us.

When we received the print of the picture for the exhibition, we were stunned. The photograph looked unbelievably beautiful. It has the qualities of a good painting, rendering fine vibrations of light penetrating the translucent flesh of fruits, shaping them and making them and their bowl glow. A simple collection of objects turned into a feast for the eyes. This was a surprise even for the artist himself, although he always uses old-fashioned photography techniques involving film, exposed, developed and projected on to photo-sensitive paper, and knows its ability to render light and colour in a way unattainable in the digital process.

This photograph hangs in the Library of Pushkin House, and it captures the daylight in a most remarkable way, as if the light that touches the skin of the fruits is coming straight from the large windows of Pushkin House, from Bloomsbury Square. It is easy to imagine how these fruits were washed, put in a bowl and arranged on a kitchen table in a small flat in a standard block of flats in a Russian city, to be admired and then eaten by children.

‘To change the world we need to change the stories about it,’ writes John Peter Askew in his book ‘We’. This modest collection of fruits in the Russian city of Perm carries the message to Bloomsbury that harmony and beauty can be found in the everyday. Some not very ample food arranged with love is beautiful. But the beauty here, as  in many of Askew’s works, is a political statement. The artist says: ‘At the centre of my work is the desire to pay respect to the things in the world that I photograph, whether that is a person, an artefact, a plant, or an animal. The photographs should show them in their best light, in every sense: they assert their place in the world and their value to the social circle around them.’ (Askew, 2019, 373)

The golden light of the photo reminds me of the colours of the skies in the fantastical city described in Zamyatin’s dystopian novel, eponymous to the exhibition. ‘We’ contains a stark description of golden light, penetrating the monotonous, regular and transparent blocks of flats. The novel is full of descriptions of brightness in a city built on reason alone. The book is a stark critique of a new collectivity, shaped by the progress of technology -  a mechanical, soulless We, totally controlled by the state. The book was written in 1920, at the end of the Revolution and Civil War in Russia, and after the author’s work on the shipyards of Newcastle, supervising the building of the Russian icebreaker. Reading it today, one hundred years later, we are stunned by the insights into the surveillance society we are facing now as we witness how the ‘category of transparency’ is gradually drifting from the fundamental values of democratic society into the dark realm of total control.

Zamyatin was a revolutionary and activist who once believed that the Revolution would change the world for the better, making it more fair, equal and happy. One hundred years after Zamyatin’s attempt to understand what went wrong, the artist John Peter Askew names his work after the novel as if to make another attempt to find the answer. ’Our neglect of the peculiarities of everyday lived experience, and our failure to pay them attention or give them merit is one thing that leads to an immoral society, that neither cares for its fellow man and woman, nor for the wellbeing of the wider world.’  

But the fruit in a bowl is just fruit, juicy, sweet and aromatic. And the bowl is non-expensive - a mass produced vessel. We are free to see whatever we want in it, and the artist allows us this freedom. And this is one of the significant qualities of art - it grants us the freedom to see and decide for ourselves.

Elena Zaytseva

Elena Zaytseva is the curator of Pushkin House’s exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.