PRESS, LITERATURE & MEDIA
Listed here are publications of and about Ken Reynolds' work, sometimes as links, sometimes as complete texts.
Secret Landscapes, 1991
Ken's first published book, a booklet actually, was a catalogue of the photos in his highly successful "Secret Landscapes" exhibit that travelled around Europe throughout the 1990s and even into the 2000s. It includes a brief essay on Ken's art at the time.
Photography is in no great shape these days. The perspective of photography is that of the peep-hole, one-eyed and static, fixing you to the spot against the deepest human urges to glance, dart, move freely across, through and into space; to embrace life.
New computer technologies of printing will let us control the photographic image on paper with the freedom a painter has moving paint on canvas. The old veracity of a photograph, so quickly taken for granted for over a century, wilts. You will not know if what is there was ever there. The responsibility is taken back from the technology, and is returned to the artist, and to us. Ken Reynolds knows this.
Yet his taste is discreet, he disdains interference and, keeping to the old technology, limits himself to what is there, to a literal, modest honesty: what is here was there. What we make of it, however is what we make of it. As of life. And the magic of Ken Reynolds' work is that you see what was there in many ways - you know what was there but not what it was or what it can become in you.
Ken Reynolds is an alchemist of imagery, using fine film and giving that unblemished sheen only photography offers. These gleaming flat pictures of flattish metal sheets in a variety of states of decay, corrosion, corruption and collapse, render a feast of analogy to our deepest ability to sense a hidden narrative of shape, colour and pattern in things. The meaningless metal is redeemed by strong light and, by implication, by our gaze through the photograph, opening up scenes of human drama and passion in our all too wasteful world but equally in our limitless, unquenchable creative imagination.
"Ken Reynolds: An Alchemist at Work," by Jonathon Brown.
Moscow Observer, 1997
Ken Reynolds lives in Scotland, not far from Edinburgh. He is 58. He works in a large law office where he is something of an office manager.
Ken Reynolds is an artist. For years he has been working with painting, or, more precisely, a special kind of art combining the techniques of photography and painting. He has been fascinated by theatre for years, especially that made in Russia and East-Europe. He tries never to miss theatres touring to Great Britain and, naturally, the Edinburgh Festival. The idea to begin photographing theatre siezed him four years ago when he saw a performance of Lev Dodin's Gaudeamus during a tour of the Maly Drama Theatre to Glasgow. The first time Ken entered a theatre with a camera came a year later when the Film Actors Theatre of Tbilisi performed Mikhail Tumanishvili's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Edinburgh.
Ken made the photos on these pages in Russia. In the last year Reynolds has twice visited Moscow specially to shoot the productions of Henrietta Yanovskaya, Valery Fokin, Pyotr Fomenko, and Kama Ginkas. His photos of theses productions have been published in many leading newspapers, to say nothing of specialized theatrical publications. One need only look briefly at the works of Ken Reynolds to be convinced - and this is not to offend Moscow's photographers, amidst whom there are many masters - that no Moscow photographer could have seen these productions as Ken does.
It is no secret that the best theatre photographs are most often little more than excellent actors' portraits. Reynolds, even when he's shooting closeups, succeeds in doing incomparably more: He creates portraits of performances, in some indescribably way capturing on film the very air of the theatrical act, its shapes and nearly its sounds. His compositions are usually "wrong" - he may cut off a face, blur a body, and chose an image that someone else might consider unsuccessful. But that is precisely the photographer's artistic power, independent, but extraordinarily sensitive to the forces at work on stage.
Ken shot these productions at first sight, without preparation, and not taking time to contemplate his task. Evidently, nothing but his exceptional intuition and talent are what move his hand in such conditions. Only they could do that unseen work that, frankly, what turns a snap of the camera into an artistic gesture.
Roman Dolzhansky, "Ken Reynolds: View from the Side," Moscow Observer, No. 1-2, 1997, pp. 26-29. Original in Russian.
Published Photos
Ken's photos began appearing in books, and on their covers, around 1996.
1) Ed. Maria M. Delgado & Paul Heritage: In Contact with the Gods (Manchester University Press, 1996).
2) John Freedman, Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997).
3) Kama Ginkas & John Freedman, Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs (Smith & Kraus, 2003). Cover (see at left) and numerous photos inside.
4) Ed. Helena Autio-Meloni, Elavan Teatterin Luto [The Magic of Live Theatre] (Kirja Kerrallaan, 2003). Cover and photos throughout the book.
5) Maria Shevtsova, Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre - Process to Performance (Routledge 2004). Cover and full page plates.
6) Kama Ginkas & John Freedman, Teatrul Provocator: Kama Ginkas regizeaza [Provoking Theater in Romanian translation (Unitext, 2008). Cover and numerous photos inside.
7) Kama Ginkas & Henrietta Yanovskaya, What was That? [Что это было?] (Artist, Rezhissyor, Teatr, 2014). Numerous plates.
8) Kama Ginkas, How it Was [Как это было] (Navona, 2018). Numerous plates.
Ken's photos have been published in magazines and newspapers too numerous to count. But these were his frequent publishers: TheatreForum (US), The Moscow Times (Russia), New Theatre Quarterly (UK), Theater (US), New York Times, Plays International (UK), Der Zeit (Germany).
ON KEN REYNOLDS, 2000
This is a republication of a short intro I wrote on Ken's art for a brand new journal, Teatr: Russian Theatre Past and Present in the year 2000. It was the lead-in to a collection of 10 photos that Ken culled from his enormous archive. The journal - as great an idea as it might have been - went belly-up after just the third issue. As such, the only place you can find my short essay is as a "reprint" on my own Blogs and Stray Articles blog. You can go here to find that. If you're not sure you want to go there, here's a teaser, a graph that follows my assertion that both Lev Dodin and Kama Ginkas, independently of each other, had indicated to me they were eager for Ken to publish a book of photographs of their productions...
"...The reason for that is simple," I wrote. "Ken does not merely photograph actors, sets, action, productions or even performances. He captures essences. He apprehends the motivations behind what we see. He reveals the architecture of movement. Relying on layers of light and shade, he fixes in freeze frames those images that express the reasons why writers write their plays, why directors have endeavored to stage them and why actors perform them..."
Excerpt from: “The Theatrical Photography of Ken Reynolds”
In Teatr: Russian Theatre Past and Present, Vol. 1 (2000): 105-106.
By John Freedman
Ken Reynolds, Photographer Extraordinaire, 2003
To accompany the A.R.T.’s production of Lady with a Lapdog, we are delighted to be mounting an exhibition at the Theatre of photographs by Ken Reynolds, who has been following the work of Kama Ginkas for two decades. The exhibition is made possible by the kind support of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. [Available here and reposted here.]
Ken Reynolds is one of the most important photographers to record the riches of Eastern European theater in the last decade. A lifelong resident of England, he had already established an international reputation in the 1980s as a visionary photographer of naturally-occurring color patterns in rusting metals–what he called Secret Landscapes–when, in London in the early 1990s, he came into contact with Lev Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre from St. Petersburg, Russia. As Ken sat transfixed, he imagined the moving images of actors in light as a series of black-and-white photos. His life as an artist changed. This encounter, plus subsequent ones with theaters from Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland, encouraged him to begin photographing theater, specifically from Eastern Europe. A trip to Russia in 1995 brought him into contact with Kama Ginkas and Henrietta Yanovskaya at Moscow’s New Generation Theatre and provided him with his greatest inspiration and most fertile source for material. Ken’s photos of their work–he records their productions not only during rehearsals but also as they grow and change while playing in repertory and on foreign tours–have appeared in publications all over the world, and have been featured in exhibitions in Moscow, Teheran, Tbilisi (Georgia), Bunde (Germany), Gdansk (Poland), and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Ken’s theater photographs–usually, though not exclusively, in black-and-white–are marked by an extraordinary sense of movement and space. His ability to see content in the unusual forms of a blurred hand or a shaded eye do not merely provide representations of dramatic scenes but reveal the underlying meaning that directors and actors impart to their work. His photos hang permanently in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the British Council in Glasgow, the Finnish Opera in Helsinki, the Andrei Tarkovsky Museum and the New Generation Theatre in Moscow.
By John Freedman in ARTicles vol. 2 i.1, September 1, 2003.
Photos copyright © Ken Reynolds. Two shots of Kama Ginkas's production of The Lady with the Lapdog with Igor Gordin and Yulia Svezhakova.
KEN'S OWN BOOKS, 2001-2017
Beginning around 2013 Ken began publishing luxurious, glossy, oversized books as gifts for his favorite directors. For the most part these books were published in two copies - one for Ken, and one for the director. However, the first collection of his photographs published was in 2001, a photographic record of the Tehran International Theatre Festival. The list below is probably not complete.
2001 – The 19th International Fadjr Theatre Festival Through The Lens of a Photographer (Tehran).
2013 – Almost Everything to Now – From Ken Reynolds to Kama Ginkas.
2013 – The Heart of a Theatre: Henrietta Yanovskaya – Photographs by Ken Reynolds.
2014 – The Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg. Directed by Lev Dodin – a collection for Lev Dodin covering work from Brothers and Sisters to Life and Fate. 1994-2007.
2015 – Four Productions: Kama Ginkas [Hedda Gabler, Shakespeare’s Fools, Nocturne, and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?]
2015? – The Polyphony of the World: Kama Ginkas.
2016 – Kama Ginkas: Russian Dreams after Dostoevsky.
2017 – Boris Yukhananov: Orchard V. Regeneration.
2017 – Boris Yukhananov: The Constant Principle.
2017 – Boris Yukhananov: Drillalians, Vols. I, II, III, IV, V.
2017? – William Shakespeare: Othello Directed by Yuri Butusov.
2017? – Chekhov: Uncle Vanya Directed by Yuri Butusov.
2017? – Chekhov: The Seagull Directed by Yuri Butusov.
2017? – Three Sisters: CHEKHOV Directed by Yuri Butusov.
2017? – The Good Person of Szechuan: Yuri Butusov.
2017? – Macbet. Kino: Yuri Butusov.
2017? – King Lear and Richard III: Yuri Butusov.
2017? – Gogol. The Marriage: Yuri Butusov.
? – A Japanese Story. Chikmatsu Monzaemon. Directed by Yasudo Masahiro.
? – Julius Caesar : Silviu Purcarete
? – Faust : Silviu Purcarete
? – Oidip/ Oedipus Silviu Purcarete
? – Three Operas : Silviu Purcarete
? – Marat Sade: Charles Muller
? – Ionesco The Lesson: Mihai Maniutiu
? – Zarathoustra : Krystian Lupa
? – Miss Julie: Data Tavadze
? – Armine, Sister: Teatr ZAR: Jaroslav Fret
? – The Bee /Albina: Hideki Noda
PHOTOS OF WORKS BY BORIS YUKHANANOV
Boris Yukhananov's personal website hosts a large number of photographs that Ken made of the director's work over the years. Theirs was a close relationship that included a 20-year hiatus. Ken first encountered Yukhananov in 1995 in Edinburgh, where he photographed The Garden. Some 20 years later, probably even 21, the two reconnected, and Ken made some spectacular photos of Yukhananov's productions of Drillalians, Octavia. Trepanation, and The Constant Principle. The photo to the right is from the contemporary opera Drillalians. Photos for all four productions may be perused in good quality on borisyukhananov.com.
Silviu Purcărete's The Tempest
In 2013 Ken photographed a production of The Tempest staged by Romanian director Silviu Purcărete. Yale's Theater magazine published, and posted, a rather stunning collection of 12 of Ken's photographs under the title of "The Tempest Photo Dossier."Go to theatermagazine.org to see the photos.
KEN REYNOLDS PAGE, U. OF EDINBURGH
The University of Edinburgh School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures maintains a tremendous gallery of Ken's photos, many of them from his early years as a photographer - the 1990s and the early 2000s, when he was still working exclusively in black and white.
The photo to the right is from Eimuntas Nekrosius' production of Hamlet, captured by Ken in Vilnius in 1998.
Unfortunately, the site's two links to other exhibits mounted by Ken have gone bad, but the 81 shots you can access are more than worth the trouble. They include photos of works by Valery Fokin, Henrietta Yanovskaya, Robert Sturua, Nekrosius, Viktor Kramer, the AKHE Engineering Theatre of St. Petersburg, and more. They gallery, titled "Ken Reynolds: Russian Theatre in Performance, may be accessed here.
KEN ON HENRIETTA YANOVSKAYA
Ken wrote this remembrance for a piece in the Russian Culture newspaper ("Дама и козырной ТЮЗ" // Культура. — 2010. — № 23. — С.9.) It is available in Russian on the website of the Moscow Young Spectator Theatre.
While I am writing, Aida is playing, and I immediately find myself in the past - on November 3, 1995, in your theatre, when actors in golden Egyptian costumes triumphantly emerge through the dark gray haze and The Heart of a Dog begins.
How wonderful it is to be there, in the central aisle, camera in hand, when the stage practically envelops me.
We met only the day before, a day or two before the performance. Then you invited me once more - to Ivanov. And I found myself in a completely different world: forests and rusted walls.
Such confidence, so immediately and so generously shown to an unknown Englishman who wished to photograph performances that he had not seen before - all this was, as I realized later, very typical of you and your theater. In those first moments, I could not even imagine that fifteen years later my life would be so generously gifted and inspired by everything that followed our acquaintance. Over the years, we have met many times in many places, and these meetings have left wonderful memories. Among them - the very first rehearsal of The Storm with Igor Yasulovich, sitting on a bench, facing the wall, absolutely motionless, until Ostrovsky's storm breaks. A few years later, there were two powerful simultaneous storms on the Hudson River - your Storm, within the walls of the newly opened Frank Gehry Theater, covered with a silver metal roof, and then, when the performance began, a real thunderstorm. It thundered through the walls of the theatre, as if trying to penetrate into it.
I will not forget a shopping trip in New York to some giant shop for props, including a pair of black hands, which later looked so tragic in A Streetcar Named Desire - another amazing performance that eradicated tradition, and in which one's imagination is shocked every minute, including the Koreans who appeared from nowhere - the servants of the proscenium. How I would like to see this performance and my beloved Storm in England and Scotland, to see you in Scotland.
How delightful were our autobiographical walks through Vilnius, Kaunas and St. Petersburg when you and Kama shared stories about your student days. Such walks deepen and transform the sense of place, cover everyday streets, doors and windows with an unnoticed patina.
And more food! There was always a lot of food for the mind, but also for the stomach. When I was with you and Kama in Stratford - I forgot Shakespeare, I remembered your potatoes. Fried potatoes like I've never tasted before. In the garden, on a sunny afternoon. Still, many years later, when suddenly you and Kama dragged me to the restaurant of the House of Writers, unlike any other restaurant I had ever seen before, I felt that I found myself in the world of The Master and Margarita. Theatre is at the heart of everyday life.
Photo copyright © Ken Reynolds. Yevgeny Sarmont in Henrietta Yanovskaya's production of The Storm at the Young Spectator Theaatre, 1997.
4 RUSSIAN ARTICLES
There are four articles that ran in the Russian press in 2001 and 2014 that I have not been able to access online or through archives. The great STD Theatre Library in Moscow sent me the bibliographical information, but that is all I have at present. If I succeed in accessing these texts, I will, of course, add them here.
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Черно-белый театр // Моск.правда. — 2001. — 2 июня. — С.7 (Об открытии фотовыставки К.Рейнольдса в Москве)
"Black and White Theatre," Moskovskaya Pravda (2001, 2 June), p. 7 - on the opening of Ken's exhibit in Moscow. -
Черно-белый театр // Моск.правда. — 2001. — 20 июня. — С.5 (Об открытии фотовыставки «Черно-белый театр глазами К.Рейнольдса» в Москве)
"Black and White Theatre," Moskovskaya Pravda (2001, 20 June), p. 7 - on the opening of Ken's exhibit in Moscow. -
Данилова А. Он замедлил шаг и оказался впереди: На выставке К.Рейнольдса // Театр. — 2001. — № 3 . — С.138
Danilova, A., "He Slowed his Step and Found Himself Ahead. At an exhibit of K. Reynolds," Teatr No. 3 (2001): p. 138. -
Кен Рейнольдс // Петерб. театр. журнал. — 2014. — № 3. — С.179 // Кр. справка об англ. художнике, живущем в Эдинбурге
"Ken Reynolds," Petersburg Theatre Journal No. 3 (2014): p. 179. - short information about the English artists living in Edinburgh.
Photo copyright © Ken Reynolds. Oksana Mysina in Kama Ginkas's production of K.I. from 'Crime' at the Moscow Young Spectator Theatre, ca 1997.
BLACK AND WHITE THEATRE THROUGH THE EYES OF KEN REYNOLDS, 2001
This basic text ran in numerous media, print, TV, radio at the time of Ken's eponymous 2001 Moscow exhibit. This may be the text that ran in items No. 1 and 2 immediately above, and it can be found on the net on numerous other hosts now. I have taken this text from the Babr24.com site. It is virtually identical to the others you can find.
Within the framework of the III World Theatre Olympiad in Moscow, the IV International A.P. Chekhov Theatre Festival, the Moscow Young Spectator Theatre and the State Central Bakhrushin Theatre Museum invite you to the photo exhibit, "Black and White Theater through the Eyes of Ken Reynolds (Great Britain)," from May 24 to June 29.
The exhibit includes photographs of scenes from the following productions: The Storm by A. Ostrovsky, The Black Monk by A. Chekhov, The Execution of the Decembrists (script and production by K. Ginkas, Youth Theater, Moscow); Macbeth by W. Shakespeare (South-West Theatre, Moscow); Metamorphosis by F. Kafka (Satirikon Theatre Moscow); Hoffman - P.S.(Pushkin Drama Theatre, St. Petersburg); The Cherry Orchard by A. Chekhov (Theater Mozgo Haz, Hungary); Hamlet by W. Shakespeare (Meno Fortas Theatre, Vilnius), etc.
"I have lived and worked in Edinburgh (Scotland) for 33 years. I have been doing photography since 1979. All this time it has brought me great joy, but it never became my own. Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tarkovsky and the artists of the Russian avant-garde already had a huge influence on me then. Finally 1992 in Glasgow I saw Lev Dodin's Gaudeamus, Previously I had I worked exclusively with color abstraction. Now I wanted to take photographs of these amazing images, and only in black and white. From that moment I fell in love with the Russian theatre with all my heart, starting with the performances of Dodin, Tumanishvili and Sturua in Great Britain. In 1995 I came to Moscow, where the theatre of Ginkas and Yanovskaya became my new home. The Baltic House, Chekhov and Golden Mask festivals helped this work to develop and become more intense. This continues today. And this invaluable gift was given to me by Russia. With my photographs I thank the Russian theater from the bottom of my heart."
These photos of the guest from afar seek to recreate the feeling of a moment, so strongly expressed and so strongly felt.
"Ken Reynolds. An exhibition in the Theatre Salon at 11 Tverskoy Boulevard (House-Museum of M.N. Yermolova).
Photo copyright © by Ken Reynolds. Boris Yukhananov's production of The Garden, performed in Edinburgh, 1995.
BLACK AND WHITE THEATRE THROUGH THE EYES OF A SCOT IN LOVE, 2001
The following article, with the headline from above, was written my Marina Raikina for the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, published May 25, 2001.
Yesterday, within the framework of the Theatre Olympics in Moscow, a magnificent exhibit of photographs by Ken Reynolds opened in the Yermolova House-Museum. They depict scenes from productions of The Storm by Ostrovsky, The Black Monk and The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, Macbeth and Hamlet by Shakespeare, The Execution of the Decembrists, The Metamorphosis by Kafka ...
This noble gentleman does not understand a word of Russian, but he feels and knows Russian theatre very well. He has been living in the Scottish city of Edinburgh for 33 years and never thought to make photography his profession. Once in Glasgow, he saw a performance of Lev Dodin's Gaudeamus and was carried away by the idea of filming nothing but black-and-white theatre. That is how this exhibit was born.
Ken arrived in Moscow in advance to see and correct the installation of the exposition. He confesses: “I love Russian theatre with all my heart. Having started shooting in Great Britain the performances of Dodin, Tumanishvili and Sturua, I later visited Moscow and from the bottom of my heart I thank the Russian theatre”. Reynolds recreates the sense of the passing moment, which most vividly strikes the imagination of this master photographer.
The exhibition is open daily until June 29.
Photo copyright © by Ken Reynolds. Kama Ginkas's production of The Black Monk with Sergei Makovetsky and Vladimir Kashpur.
KEN'S PHOTOS ON THE RUSSIAN INTERNET
To make it easier for those who do not have Russian, I here provide a link to many of Ken's photographs that are available on the Russian internet through Yandex. Be careful if you use any of these, because, naturally, not every photo is by Ken - but the majority of the ones coming up first are. Google translate will help you make the proper determination.
KEN REYNOLDS: A REMEMBRANCE
This piece ran on The Theatre Times website at the end of September 2021. I offer just a snippet here - please go to the original to read the full text.
...Ken’s interests were broad, but he was a completist and a perfectionist. When he fell in love with a director’s work, he followed them wherever they went. Our correspondence was full of information about far-flung destinations: “I’m heading off to Romania”; “I’ll soon be in Iran”; “I’ve been catching up on Dodin in Milan and Vienna.” Some shows he shot five or six times, revealing nuances in the work that virtually no one but the director would ever see—he captured for posterity how these performances changed over time, whether that be from night to night, or decade to decade, and how they fit into ever new spaces as they toured to different countries and continents.
Ken told the story many times, but the most succinct version was in an email he sent me in 2014: “All the work I have done on Russian theatre was born the day I saw Gaudeamus in Glasgow in 1992. It literally changed my life...”
Photo copyright © by Ken Reynolds. Oksana Mysina in K.I. from 'Crime' at Bard College, NY, 2003. Sitting behind and over Oksana is Hedy Weiss, the critic of The Chicago Sun.
GARRY D. IRVINE'S MEMORIAL GALLERY
Upon Ken's death, Garry D. Irvine (see his remembrance on the Speaking about Ken page) put together a memorial gallery of images involving Ken personally and his work. They can be accessed on Google Docs.
The photo at left is of two of Ken's books that Garry was involved in putting together - photos of Yasuda Masahiri's production of A Japanese Story and Boris Yukhananov's production of Drillalians, Episode I.
