Photobook Theodor Tsaplya «Contents of Objects in Captivity, ” 1989

In his youth, what students now call «zines» was known as samizdat books.Photocopiers hadn’t been invented back then, so they reproduced them using photographic methods. Pages were printed in spreads, folded in half, and glued together with rubber cement.In the circle of poet B. U. Kashkin, whom the artist Shaburov frequented, there were many eccentric poets—Antip Odov, Epifania Bekeder, Sandro Moksha, and others. One of them, Theodor Tsaplya (actually Borya Katz), asked Shaburov to design a book of his poems.The book was titled «The Contents of Objects in Captivity.» It addressed a theme popular with youth of all ages—that they lived in captivity and «totalitarianism, ” but somewhere there was a world of desired „freedom“ where they absolutely had to flap their wings and fly away.How to illustrate a poetry book?One could literally draw how the author is tormented by certain obsessions; one could create a system of visual images that somehow intersect with the verbal content; or one could investigate what real-life experiences drove the author to create this artwork.Shaburov went to Borya’s apartment and photographed another absurdist list of objects selected according to the meaning of his poems. Somewhere, Borya Katz himself is reflected in a mirror; somewhere, it is Shaburov; on another page, the knees of Borya’s fiancée can be seen.However, Borya’s fiancée later persuaded him to leave with her for a distant Israel at the time, where he disappeared. He worked at a power plant and stopped writing poems.