Contemporary conversations about the human impact on the ecosystem and the political perspectives opening up to society hardly ever have positive context. The human condition, whether it be a set of specific psychophysical phase-states, political circumstance-states, or moral and symbolic capital-states in the contemporary ecological agenda, is now on the verge of exhaustion. Artists and social philosophers are increasingly turning to the theme of non-human agents, shifting the focus of human attention to the things beyond, which are potentially superior to the human. It is customary to speak of the incompleteness and simplification of a picture of the world centered on the human being and to associate utopian ideas with transcending his body and the boundaries of his experience.

Today “Human condition” seems to be a formulation of the past. In Russian, this universal concept, covering both personal experience and the global agenda, failed to catch on and has always required contextual explanations. Not without reason, this notion has been translated differently as human destiny, conditions of human existence, human conditionality, etc. At the height of its popularity, in the middle of the 20th century, it implied an active and constructive notion of the individual, a notion of values shared by the community, of the openness of the public world, and was inextricably linked to the modern humanist paradigm, in which media were accorded the status of a trustworthy mediator. In René Magritte’s The Human Condition (La condition humaine, different versions painted in 1933, 1934, 1935), the frame of a window with an idyllic landscape is eclipsed by a painting in which the landscape view continues, flowing from the outside world into the room without distortion or stitching. This notion of coherence, of harmony between the outer world and the inner human world, achieved through the unity of vision, was inherited from Surrealism to the classic documentary reportage of the mid-century. That happened primarily thanks to the large-scale exhibition “The Family of Man” (first shown at MoMA in 1955), whose main program was a reflection of the global “human condition”.

Documentary photography postured itself as a universal language, not distorted or discredited by ideology, and the contemplative mode of interaction with the world it dictated was analogous to political consciousness. An intended naivety that today has lost its persuasiveness.

Today, the relationship between the external world and the inner world of the individual is conceptualized as a drama, a deep split, a knot of contradictions. For a long time, photo-reportage has existed in the Humanist paradigm of the unity of values and the identity of the external and the internal. But now it is rapidly losing ground, photography is being valued less, and the understanding of its nature, traditionally built around the concept of “documentality”, is being blurred. Nevertheless,

in the post-truth era, the demand for the following remains acutely relevant: for forms of authentic expression, for a language that would provide a direct appeal to the human experience as opposed to the confusing rhetoric of the media, for an experience that would bring us to each other, that would show us how to be together.

Although the belief in photographic truth is increasingly viewed as an outdated habit of the observer, artists and photographers are in no rush to declare the potential of the “documentary” exhausted. What is the relevance of the language of photography today? Isn’t photography a thing of the past together with the twentieth century? What can the expressive language of realistic photography give to the modern statement? What forms does it take in the world of new media?

The artists exhibited use photographs to convey their experience of interacting with the human, its lack or overcoming – whether it is a state of affect or a revelation of the unconscious, longing for wholeness, or a sense of belonging. Thus, Ksenia Tsykunova, Nikita Shokhov, and Ilya Rodin turning to the canon of documentary photography use the language of new media to give new acuteness to the sense of rupture between the viewer and the hero, the social construct and the contradictory personality. Arnold Veber and Sasha Chaika show human nature dissolving into a chaos of instincts and fetishistic sensuality. Tanya Chaika and Olga Vorobyova speculate on the potentiality and forms of fusion with nature. Ksenia Yablonskaya, Chapaykina and Smyrna, and Sofia Pankevich build a new language of images and metaphors for expressing extreme mental and physiological states. Alisa Gorshenina, Vera Barkalova, Ekaterina Kovalenko, and Alisa Gill reorganize the filming and creative process as folklore action, ritual, and group performance, elevating the viewer to the collective unconscious or a liminal situation. Sofia Tatarinova and Ivan Petrokovich conceptualize the fundamental conditioning of reality by the observer’s gaze as an ethical dilemma. Finally, Anastasia Mleko and Maksim Ivanov offer their original variants of the fusion of optics and psyche mediated by a non-human – technical or natural – agent.

For each of the authors, a drama unfolds when it’s impossible to have an absolute approach and knowledge of the Other through sight. Thus, photography helps highlight the values of integrity and communication and throws light on the problem of their implementation.

As media, it appears that photography has not a pleasant status of an obsolete language for discussing the issues underlying its identity. However, contemporary creative practices allow us to review documentary and humanism metaphorically. Photography still symbolizes the very “form of reality itself” that leaves its trace in our inner world but gets rid of the burden of illusory transparency of representation with which society once endowed it. As a media that gives greater visibility and a specific sensual tone to the collision of two worlds: outside and inside a person, it still retains its relevance today. No less important is the motif of active vision, also genetically linked to photography.

In her program text, “Vita activa” (in the first edition of 1958 it was called “Human condition”), Hannah Arendt emphasizes the importance of action as the basis of human community. Comparing media space to global theater, a show that hypnotizes and renders the subject passive, critics of contemporary society often oppose modern media, including photography, to real activity and dream of a radical rejection of media in general. Instead of the utopia of a world not connected by mediality, contemporary authors suggest using the cultural and discursive photography background to discover the potential for overcoming the crisis: in their works, photography overcomes its contemplation, its aloofness from the world and becomes the act that connects people and enlightens the human existence.