This is a semi-lost little piece I wrote about Ken Reynolds almost 20 years ago. It was for the ARTicles newspaper put out by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, which was then premiering both a production by Kama Ginkas (Lady with a Lapdog), and an exhibit of Ken’s photographs. I happened to be rummaging around in an old hard disk this morning and found a link to this piece, the text of which I had lost. I followed the link, which is now dead, but that took me to the ART site which, I’m pleased to say, still has this piece posted (along with a small gallery of four of Ken’s photographs). So, go ahead, confuse a webmaster, follow this new link and give an old blurb some clicks. My single paragraph is boilerplate stuff, but Ken was not, this exhibit was not, and nothing that brings the attention of the world to the work of Ken Reynolds, photographer extraordinaire, is lacking in value. If nothing else, I chose an appropriate title.
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“Ken Reynolds, Photographer Extraordinaire”
ARTicles vol. 2 i.1
By John Freedman
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.
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.
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