How Alexey Titarenko Turns Cities Into Poetry Using Just a Camera and Time Itself
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'The City is a Novel,' by Alexey Titarenko (published by Nailya Alexander Gallery). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
What if the soul of a city could be photographed?
Alexey Titarenko has been trying to answer that question for nearly 50 years. Using long exposure, darkroom techniques, and careful sequencing, he transforms familiar streets into something that feels like memory or even music. His new book, The City Is a Novel (2025), is the expanded second edition of a classic that’s been out of print for almost a decade. It is a rare chance to experience his evolving vision across St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York.
This is not a book about architecture or city planning.
This is about emotion, movement, and time told through photography. The images are not just new. Many are carefully replaced to strengthen the visual narrative, supported by updated printing techniques and essays from curators. This second edition feels more personal, more accurate, and more complete than ever before.
Forget snapshots, this is what memory actually looks like.
The Book
The City Is a Novel by Alexey Titarenko (Second Extended Edition, 2025) - Originally published in 2014 and long out of print, The City Is a Novel returns in 2025 as a richly expanded edition of Alexey Titarenko’s career-defining work. Spanning five decades of photography, the book features more than 150 black-and-white images created between 1975 and 2024 in cities including St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York.
Known for his signature long-exposure technique and poetic darkroom processes, Titarenko transforms urban scenes into dreamlike reflections on time, memory, and the human condition. This new edition includes updated sequences, previously unpublished images, and significant technical improvements in image reproduction, offering prints that more faithfully reflect his gelatin silver originals.
The book also features an autobiographical essay by the artist titled City of Shadows, along with critical writings by Gabriel Bauret, Brett Abbott, and Sean Corcoran, all respected curators and historians who have followed Titarenko’s work for decades. (Nailya Alexander Gallery, Amazon)
“The City is a Novel” (2025) is an expanded edition of your earlier work. What new perspectives or themes are introduced in this edition, and how do they reflect your evolution as a photographer?
“The City is a Novel” was first published about 10 years ago and has been out of print since 2016. This is the main reason the second edition was needed as we had many inquiries about the book. As I live in New York I continue photographing the city. As a consequence, I wanted to add new photographs in the new edition, underlying an evolution of my vision.
I also had time to review the book and decided to replace a few images in the St. Petersburg and Havana chapters with different photographs offering a stronger narrative, so the second edition of the book is more comprehensive.
A major issue with the first edition was the color separation: for even slightly toned gelatin silver prints a color profile was needed but sometimes it added too much color and some images lost their B&W look. In the second edition, this was done differently, still in full color but using a different profile so the photographs are more accurately reproduced, closer to the original B&W gelatin silver prints.
Was there a specific image you added that felt especially important to your evolution as an artist?
Every image that is in the book is important to me. Their combination, and how they are sequenced one after another may already straighten the narrative, but sometimes the narrative looks more understandable with a different image. Where are these different images in the book, and how do they reflect my evolution as a visual artist and photographer - I’d like to give this opportunity of discovery to the readers.
Your photography often portrays cities like St. Petersburg, Venice, Havana, and New York. How does each city’s unique atmosphere influence your creative process, and what draws you to these particular urban landscapes?
What I’m photographing is not a particular city, the city is just a “means” if not a “tool” (like for a composer a combination of particular melodies in a minor or major mode) to express my vision. The real subject matter is the human condition, human life, including my emotions in front of certain events or certain places where I happen to be. So what is in the picture is not a city’s atmosphere, but my inner “atmosphere”, feelings, and emotions inside a particular place in a particular city. The ways how I perceive it are translated into visual metaphors, sometimes created by long exposure, sometimes by particular effects during printing (like pseudo solarisation), sometimes the metaphor is already in the subject of the picture.
Can you describe a moment when a place revealed something unexpected about your own inner world?
Every “unique” atmosphere is a product of the creative function of our brain and metaphorically our hearts, not of the place itself.
Even the atmosphere of the public bathroom, like the one described in “The Guermantes Way“ by Marcel Proust (which gives later on different emotional and esthetic ramifications and connections in In Search of Lost Time next volumes) can in some cases have a unique atmosphere, but it’s not because of the bathroom itself, but because of us, humans, our hearts and souls…
The use of long exposure in your work creates a dreamlike quality, emphasizing movement and the passage of time. What inspired you to adopt this technique, and how do you feel it enhances the narrative within your images?
Collaborations with art historians and curators, such as Gabriel Bauret and Brett Abbott, have been integral to your publications. How have these collaborations shaped the presentation and interpretation of your work in “The City is a Novel”?
I feel privileged to have had an opportunity to work with remarkable art historians and curators like Brett Abbott, Sean Corcoran, and Gabriel Bauret. My collaboration with Gabriel Bauret started in 1988 and continues until this day. Gabriel was a curator of my major personal show at the Reattu Museum in 2002, within the framework of the Arles Festival. I met Brett Abbott in 2009. In 2011 Brett Abbott included my Havana series in his exhibition A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Thanks to my relationship with Sean Corcoran, the Museum of the City of New York has a good collection of my New York photographs. Sean included a few photographs in the 2020 exhibition Collecting New York's Stories, at the Museum of the City of New York.
I’m very grateful to still have these unique relationships.
Reflecting on your career from your early days in Leningrad to your current work in New York, how has your perception of urban life transformed, and how is this evolution captured in your latest works featured in “The City is a Novel” (2025)?
As I mentioned earlier, urban life is not the subject of my artistic oeuvre. As my artistic vision evolves so are my photographs. I also like to experiment with various printing techniques. My New York photographs especially are different as I use multiple tonings: sepia, selenium, gold along with silver reducing (Farmer reducer) on certain spots by brush.
The main point of my essay “City of Shadows” is to give a comprehensive answer to this question, without falling into a flatness. It can not be done in a few sentences. I also respectfully welcome all readers to go to the “press” section of my website and look at some interviews there, specifically the one for the Shots magazine in 2005 (by Russell Joslin).
What do these physical processes allow you to express that digital or more straightforward prints might not?
The purpose of Using toning can, in some cases, be the same as the use of color for painters, it’s one of the tools that visual artists have. The New York series is not an exception.
When I started to use toning and why, what this process means for me - I’m extensively speaking about it on the pages of my essay, comparing it, moreover with similar techniques in other arts.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Nailya Alexander Gallery, Amazon)
More photography books?
We'd love to read your comments below, sharing your thoughts and insights on the artist's work. Looking forward to welcoming you back for our next [book spotlight]. See you then!
