OPi8.com :: Vision

Photographer Vasily Konstantin illustrates, one by one, each of Ian Brady's arguments concerning modern culture, which sprouts and nurtures (yet hypocritically denounces) outbreaks of violence and murder. Konstantin's pictures, which portray crime, atrophy, advanced putrefaction, venal perversions and filthy urban altars, are but a one web, frightening and beautiful, of all the estrangement, loneliness, filth and inner instability which caused Franz Biberkopf to falter, Jean Genet to swear vengeance on the hypocrisy of the respectable world that dares to argue, in its nudity, that its attire is that of decency, that which causes Travis Bickle to erupt - and burst in shooting. Here does Janus' reveal his black face, gates open to any harm that might find Rome. This world of illusions is the world of murder, and fetish, of a sterile — yet still unrestrained — passion, brought out of indifference; a world of open sewers, abandoned luxury stores, of churches that turned into dusty cellars and catacombs, of strange sex cults, and of even stranger death cults, and of cults which are a combination of the two in one — a world where the only safe child is the one made of stone.

Life here is a life where rot navigates itself into every corner, from dirty religious icons to dead pigeons on the edge of sidewalks, and even in the fingerprints. Here insects and pests liven in their homes, fat and content thanks to the comfortable warmth of the rotten swamp which man has made out of his living environment. Here ears bleed, inside voices sneer and cry for help, and blood spills, red and seething like a life that cannot exist in such a world. Here the wounds of the crucified drip for all eternity, but that is not the blood of the crucified one, red and trickling down from the statue. This world is the world seen from the post-modern Raskolnikov's fever-ridden point of view, a world where the stress of wrath and rage builds up quietly inside the silent witness to all of life's fallacies, forcing him to erupt — the world of taxi driver Travis Bickle. It is a world where the passion is death, the orgasm is a straight line, and violence is not a necessity or a pleasure, it is the default option — God is dead, all is permitted; including murder.

Excerpt from "Dead Pigeons" by Asher Schechter