There’s also a more profound reason for the exhibition’s popularity. Photography is a democratic medium, and artists using it miraculously transfer even the most radical experiments into a field that is widely accessible. Shooting for tabloids and magazines is considered to be one of the most glamorous professions in Russia; young people also believe that it’s easy money. The more formalist genres of contemporary visual art, represented at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, don’t get nearly as much attention, because they are seen as elitist and complicated by Russian viewers. Many Muscovites scoff at the multiple contexts and intellectual rhetoric of contemporary art but see photographs differently, believing them to be grounded in reality and history and to speak of actual experiences — even if they do ultimately play tricks on us.