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If we’re talking about someone who poses for me It’s important for me to establish personal contact.
If I feel that there is trust between us and this trust can be felt, then I can do something;
If there is no trust, then the photos either don’t work out at all, or turn out very crappy and there is no magic.
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I moved to Kyiv. I took Viktor Marushchenko’s course at the School of Photography.
Before that, I wasn’t even really interested in photography, in terms of history, foreign photographers.
I also met many people through photography, people whom I followed years ago on Flickr.
Polina Polikarpova, I remember her first photos, Sasha Kurmaz, many other guys.
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I have friends from other countries, and we are very close.
I feel that I’m on the same wavelength as them, and if we overlook the matter of language,
I don’t see any differences between us.
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The story with Kyiv is weird, because I love and hate it at the same time,
and these two strong feelings often just swap places with each other.
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I have always felt that a person always draws people’s eyes the most. You compare yourself to them.
I’ve always seen that the public inevitably responds to photos with people better.
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I feel like there is a lot of sex in our world, and everyone likes it.
Everyone wants to see sexuality, sex, I don't know…
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Yes. For instance, girls will start to kiss for show, put on glasses, or make sexual poses.
Most of the time I will wait until they stop and photograph them at a moment when they aren’t paying attention.
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That experience of fashion photoshoots I had in the past started to affect my personal projects, and I don’t really like it,
because I want to take my own shot, a more emotional one, but it turns out more like a fashion shot.
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To be honest, I was infuriated by it, because I thought that all these damned hipsters had bought film cameras and rushed to take pictures of the “Sovok” just because it was now trendy.
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On the one hand, I love people, but on the other hand, I don’t really like them,
and this, once again, is the same situation as with Kyiv.
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I mean, it’s both about myself and about the people around me — about the way they search for comfort.
Some find it in their work, some decorate their homes, some move somewhere, some start a relationship...
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I was not interested in photographing people who wanted it to be a staged shot.
I wanted people to be in the middle of an action, and I took a photo of that action.
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There is now a whole generation of young people who were still kids when we took photos of them,
and now they also want to take photos because they think it’s cool.
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Well, I think it would be harder to get ahead without social media.
I still think that it’s a good tool if you use it correctly.
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At the moment, I use the crafts of both my parents – photography and costumed styling.
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And then, after three years in Kyiv, I thought about moving to Berlin.
Maybe because I had this extensive experience of moving, and I felt like I needed to move on.
But then, at some point, I felt super comfortable, and now I don’t want to live anywhere but Kyiv.
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I’ve already grown tired of these images, they destroy our mind.
Because these are devices, crutches. And we can't no longer imagine our world without crutches.
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The key thing is that they try to look hot. I mean, it’s fake, they’re acting.
But I like real sexuality.
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And this is a big problem, I see lots of images which look great formally but they are empty.
There is no meaning to them, there is no idea, there is nothing…
Apart from some kind of combinations of objects, light, things which have nothing inside.
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In addition, it also came naturally from childhood impressions, because my father’s standard of beauty,
for instance, was this glamorous, silicon-filled, exaggerated sexuality of the 2000s—this full-breasted brunette.
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I cannot take photos of someone whom I can’t feel deep inside,
if we have no connection, then the photoshoot doesn’t work out.
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It’s difficult to say what I focus on, I use intuition.
Before Kiev, I had photos like this: I just pull out a camera on the go and take a picture, just at an emotional level.
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When I started to do photography ten years ago, I tried to find my place — my own signature style — and I relied on famous foreign photographers.
Mostly fashion photographers like Steven Meisel, who worked with Madonna, because she was my second mom.
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Everyone has a phone, everyone uses the web.
Everyone’s attention is distracted, everyone can’t focus on work,
because social media, phones, all these things are destroying our minds, our consciousness, our lives.
Oh, I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
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In colloquial slang terms, I can say that at first I became interested in post-Soviet aesthetics,
and now I got more interested in the “aesthetics of the backwater.”
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For me, there is a fear that if I see something, it will stay in my head and then reappear unconsciously in my work, making it less original.
However, because of the excess of information, things inevitably do get stuck in your head one way or another and get copied unintentionally.
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This is probably linked to the fact that I’m quite shy and keep to myself, so it’s easier for me to take a photo of someone I know,
although I often have a feeling that I want to take photos of someone I don’t know, from Instagram, for instance.
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I treat photoshoots as if someone is about to take photos of me:
it’s much easier for me to find a model and endow her with some of my features.
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Maybe the world has gotten fed up with what it’s seen before,
and people are curious about what’s going on in Ukraine?
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I like the idea of banning picture-taking, because that way people are fully immersed in the aesthetics of the moment
and feel it more deeply, channel it through themselves.
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I also used the aesthetics of fashion photography,
of which I’d seen a lot in fashion magazines back when I was a kid.
In particular, its staged nature, artificial poses, proper angles.
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I think that I’m attracted by more abstract things, by some kind of output of human imagination.
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The boundary between commercial and creative photography is quite blurred for me,
because photos from practically 99 percent of the girls who came to me for private photoshoots were later included in my portfolio.
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You consume information, it’s all digested in there.
And then you may, even if you don’t want to, create a shot which you’ve seen briefly and you’ve even forgotten about it.
And then they can accuse you of plagiarism.
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Later, I realized that I was interested in using irony, kitsch, and nostalgia as the three main topics in my work.
I also used the aesthetics of fashion photography, which I’d often seen in fashion magazines back when I was a kid.
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I can put it like this: Ukraine is forming like in photography
it hasn’t been revealed yet, it hasn’t been developed yet
there is interest in certain things among certain people but you cannot say that it’s a trend.
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