The award-winning Moscow-born filmmaker and photographer Alexander “Sasha” Kargaltsev has lived in Brooklyn for the past seven years. Forced to flee the censorship and persecution he experienced in his homeland as an LGBTQ artist and activist, Kargaltsev was granted asylum in the United States in 2010. His career as a photographer was launched in New York with his first exhibition, Asylum (2012), which documented his fellow Russian-born gay asylum seekers who had also fled the increasingly harsh persecution at home. The exhibition generated strong reactions in his homeland. Later this month (October 22-25, 2017), Kargaltsev will be unveiling a new project of works on paper, titled Disassembled, at the Fridman Gallery in Soho. In early September, the Rail contributor Ivan Talijancic met with Kargaltsev in Bedford-Stuyvesant to discuss what it was like growing up queer in Putin’s Russia, his early artistic and activist endeavors, and his new body of work, for which he developed a new technique – transferring instant-film emulsion to paper.
Ivan Talijancic (Rail): It’s good to talk to you, Sasha. Please introduce yourself to The Brooklyn Rail readers.
Alexander Kargaltsev: My name is Alexander Kargaltsev. I was born in Moscow thirty-two years ago, which means I remember what it was like to live in the Soviet Union, experiencing Perestroika and all that. I started my education as a journalist, but eventually switched to film directing at the All-Russian State University of Cinematography. Many famous Russian directors went there; most famous is Tarkovsky, but the lineage goes back as far as Eisenstein. It’s the oldest film school in the world, founded in 1919, right after the Revolution. I spent five happy years there making student movies. When I finished, I applied and was accepted into the post-graduate program, but by that time I was already traveling to film festivals with my shorts. At one of the festivals, which I did not go to because it was in L.A., I received the grand prize. I then used that money to pay tuition at the New York Film Academy—which is actually what initially brought me to New York.