Nocturne by Igor Brekhov

Nocturne is a series of staged black-and-white photographs by Igor Brekhov. Each image is built around a single woman placed inside a situation that should not be calm – a body drifting underwater, a figure standing on a car as it sinks into a river, sleepers hanging by their ankles from the branches of a night tree, a woman perched on a traffic light above an empty highway. Nothing in the series is found by chance. Brekhov works the way a film director works rather than the way a reporter works: every scene is imagined first, then physically built, lit and performed in front of the camera.

What the photographer is hunting for is one specific moment – the point at which two things that should never share a frame end up in the same picture. Tenderness meets danger; stillness meets catastrophe; a naked body meets a machine. Brekhov calls this conflict in the frame. The image stays quiet on the surface, and the tension only arrives a second later, once the viewer notices what is wrong. A car in a tree becomes a nest; a wreck becomes a stage; a drowning becomes a rest.

The word Nocturne describes a feeling rather than a time of day. These are night pictures the way dreams are night pictures – suspended, a little dangerous, hard to wake from. The women in them are never simply decoration and never victims by default; the whole point is that the viewer cannot tell whether the figure is in trouble or completely in control.

Brekhov shoots the series exclusively in black and white. Colour, he feels, explains too much – it names the season, the place, the brand of the car – and pulls the image back toward documentary. Stripped of colour, the scenes read as memory rather than record. The series has been shown in three solo exhibitions in Russia, including an immersive show in which the photographs were projected across every wall of the room, and gathered into a self-published two-part monograph. Nocturne remains ongoing, and Brekhov continues to find new impossible situations for it.

About the author:

Igor Brekhov was born in 1994. He lives and works in Sochi, Russia, as a fine-art photographer. He is self-taught. For about thirteen years he worked as an engineer before leaving that career in 2022 to devote himself entirely to photography. His series Nocturne has been shown in three solo exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, including an immersive projection show, and was gathered into a self-published two-part monograph.

Website: https://brehov.com/en

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igor.brekhov

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