© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

Time Travel by Aleksei Kazantsev is a photographic project that explores the complex relationships between time, memory, and visual perception. The artist constructs a series of images from a “forgotten time,” revealing how time acts upon the visible. The photographs do more than represent the world: they return the past to the present through the filter of the unconscious, inviting viewers to engage with their own experience, memory, and the ways in which they perceive the visible. Kazantsev creates “constructed” memories of the past, highlighting how images—and photography itself—profoundly shape what we consider true or significant, stimulating or calling into question our personal symbolic archive, our unconscious, or those elements that conflict with our conscious awareness.

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

The work is grounded in a central premise: photography does not simply record time—it reinvents it. The notion of “time travel” suggests that an image is not a window onto the past but a means of navigating constructed temporalities. Photographs function as temporal architectures, built on the paradox that what they depict has vanished, yet what they evoke remains alive in perception.
The project emphasizes the tension between subjective memory and objective documentation. Images do not return the past to us; they reveal the fiction we construct to make it bearable, intelligible, and narratable. In this sense, the artist prompts reflection on how images, and photography with its claim to veracity, shape collective memory, generating shared narratives and “credible pasts.”

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

Kazantsev seems particularly interested in the unconscious dimension of images. Photographs condense layers of meaning that we do not deliberately perceive. They speak to us before we can speak about them; they look at us before we look at them. Barthes called this the punctum: the detail that wounds, pricks, or strikes without explanation. Perhaps these images awaken a buried unconscious, provoking an instinctive reaction—like the sudden startle at seeing something that resembles a snake.

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

Attention must also be given to the “layers,” “scratches,” and “imperfections” of archival materials, which remind us that images are concrete objects, not merely representations. They acknowledge error, oversight, and corrosion, challenging the idea of a pure, untouchable visible and of unmanipulable optical fidelity. Photography is always, fundamentally, an act of editing reality. The camera constructs new memories, deconstructs the existing, and opens a dimension imperceptible to the human eye, what Walter Benjamin described as the optical unconscious. It is no coincidence that Kazantsev’s images are enlargements, zooms, and crops that elude immediate perception, revealing details and nuances. They do not attempt to objectify; rather, they invite the viewer to reconstruct them through their own images and memories.

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

With archival material, this becomes particularly interesting: images often shape our memory of epochs we never lived. Photography produces imaginaries, not documents. Entire masses may come to idolize subjects they have never seen—often reinforced by propaganda shaping social behavior.

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"

Returning to Kazantsev’s work, images that defy recognizable patterns are themselves active: they look at us and interrogate our expectations as observers. We are prompted to question how what we see constructs our identity, what we know—or think we know—and what we desire—or think we desire. It can happen, then, that rather than looking at an image, we are searching for one within ourselves.

© Aleksei Kazantsev from "Time Travel"