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The Daily Telegraph

After leaving Russia with £10 and a camera, Sasha Gusov has produced a book of remarkable images. He talks to Sue Steward:


A MAN WAITING FOR HIS MOMENT

With a whirl of wild Rasputin locks and a high-pitched giggle that shattered the office calm, the Russian photographer Sasha Gusov landed on the arts desk of this newspaper in 1994, when I was picture editor. He had perfected his sales pitch on Moscow's black market, where he once sold Western cameras to local photographers, and promptly sold me a beautiful picture of his compatriot, the dancer Irek Mukhamedov.

He still has no understanding of the concept of "exclusivity" in the capitalist newspaper world, but in the time that he has worked for The Daily Telegraph, the ritual of commissioning work from him has always been a great entertainment.

A passionate, expressive man, Gusov is hard to pigeonhole. He doesn't read photography books, rarely goes to exhibitions, and cites only a few favourites: Tina Modotti, "especially her still-fifes", and "some" Brassai. He is vehemently critical of Annie Leibowitz ("superficial and stupid") and, given his sharp eye for a revealing moment and his wry sense of juxtaposition surprisingly (even sacrilegiously) critical of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

He dismisses Cartier-Bresson's recent books - "only 10 per cent of these pictures are really interesting, but because he is so important they publish everything" - but admits that "the early ones are different, of course; some amazing photographs". The opening shot in Gusov's first book of his own work Shooting Images, is a quintessential CartierBresson moment: four boys frozen in time, diving from a stone balustrade into the lake surrounding an Indian palace.

Its perfect composition demanded alertness, meditational poise and technical precision, none of which are suggested by the man who, on portrait shoots, leaps around his Notting Hill studio shouting "Oh my God! That's fantastic!" every time he clicks the shutter.
Gusov's photographic interest came from an uncle, who photographed schoolchildren and family groups. "He taught me to process film and print - and how to lie!" he cackles. "He was cheating on his wife, and left me in his lab all night to process films and cover for him."

In 1989, he packed his suitcase to travel to this country, but the drunken send-off party left him robbed of everything except his camera and a £10 note. When he arrived in London lie sold the camera.
A series of low-paid jobs culminated in work as a cleaner at a dance studio near Oxford Street where he met young actors and dancers; and eventually set up an afterhours studio where he shot their promotional portraits. "We did a very sexy picture of Jude Law one night, undoing his belt. Ewan McGregor came with a bottle of vodka and started to drink it". The image of the then-unknown Scot, cigarette dangling from his mouth like James Dean, is startlingly beatific.

From cleaning, Gusov moved to processing black&white film for fashion photographers and used that vantage point to learn about their world. His professional turning point came in 1992, with the arrival in London of the Bolshoi Ballet.

He asked Yuri Grigorovich, who was then the Bolshoi's artistic director, if he could document their tour and was given permission to work backstage for a month. His portrait of a young swan lugging on a cigarette in a seedy corridor of the old Royal Opera House epitomises his documentary style.

Since then he has continued to work for this newspaper as well as for magazines such as National Geographic (which he bought on the black market in Russia and which fuelled his desire to see the world). And for every picture, there is another story to tell.

Sue Steward /TDT/