Humans sent a shuttle to Mars, discovered atomic energy, defeated so many diseases. Yet power is still in murder. A full-fledged killer is a symbol of a poorly understood and a dangerous status. In order to rest, really rest, renew one's resources, clean one's chakras and not dumbly self-destruct it is necessary to kill a lot of free time. Every day going to work and coming back late at night we are killing our personality. We kill our Self with drugs and alcohol. And what about wars, terrorist attacks, illnesses, sharks, snakes, assassins... All the world is murder. Documentary photography is sheer murder. If TV can be killed by pressing and button and throwing it out of the window, photography can not be destroyed as easily. It is everywhere. Only people who are blind many years can walk the streets without noticing. Photography is no threat to them. Having lived a long time I, for instance, am tired of watching this world as a document. I am a photographer and photography is torturing me with its harsh, prickly and dumb actuality. One dead woman, an American, said that everything exists for it to be photographed. A mob armed with cameras from ancient to ultra modern is running around the Earth taking photographs. They have filled everything, these photographs. They turned the world into a photo. That's why it is time to kill it. But to kill it without destroying. To kill it by giving it a new essence. To make it reflect not the murderous world around, but a creative little world inside itself. Artistic visibility generates a dissonance in the document. Artistic interpretation absorbs and kills the reality picked by photography and creates our inner reality. Two realities are put one over the other. One is killed by the other. As A;lexander Gliadelov told me over the phone: "If we kill photography's actuality, we also kill the photographer who copied this actuality, or ourselves". The following is quite essential: the unconscious ends acute madness and thus all the signs of myth or archetype that latently control us. The latter confirm that the mechanisms of myth creation are related to the mechanisms of creative and productive thinking and we put it on the paper with what was once real. The niceness of such photographs is that a murdered photography turns into a zombie. It comes to life in a different dimension. I remember in the first grade I drew a beard, a set of horns, a cigar, shoulder straps, a scar on the cheek, a black eye and a gun in the hands on Nikita Khrushchev's picture. My first grade teacher Appolinaria Vissarionovna passed out. I killed general secretary's photo. Now I just paint over the pictures of "general secretaries". I know that somewhere beneath the paint they are untouched and whole. And this way they are handsome. Vyachesliav Zavaliy from village Vozyr feeds photos to Photoshop. And a whole crazy fairy world of metaphoric puzzles is born. In Anna Voytenko's work an evil computer recovery program bit the images. They are mutilated, they are crying. Yuri Tugushev draws on live Kyiv with markers like with a scalpel. Vadim Krasnoshek is an artist and a writer from Kharkov where everyone is like that. To kill photography to him means to write and draw, to make a slogan, to make laugh. Michael Frantsuzov smokes weed wrapped in a photo. Leonid Fil lacks color, color, color. Eduard Stranadko is tender, overly gentle. He probably doesn't kill, but gives a new life. And Roman Piatkovka lives in Kharkov. Everyone kills photography there. Murder of a photo is a parody of course and an artistic ritual, but state of a game is always ambivalent itself. Who is to say what is the reverse side of this medal? What else will the photographers who killed photography want to murder? Speaking of killing, all people from Italy, Germany, USA, Hungary, Mongolia, Russia< France and Ukraine imagine the same hearing the words "to kill photography". To kill photography is to simulate a disaster. More murders that necessary for existence surround us. And a murdered photograph has a new nice life in the basement. You come over as a guest, laugh at it. But the question is: what percentage of people who write the word "photo" really understands what it is all about? It is definitely easier to do Photography calmly and methodically, day after day and not to break one's neck in an artistic pursuit. A murdered photograph is a symbol of a poorly understood and a dangerous for life essence. It is all effects of a poor lifestyle, I think.

Alexander Lyapin, Kyiv 2010