1. The artist that I chose for this post is Olya Ivanova. She mainly works in portraiture in different styles. She started taking pictures when her boyfriend bought her her first camera, cheap Canon EOS 300. The photography classes that Olya started taking weren't good and didn't help her much, but she met other photographers who influenced her a great deal and also she found her inspiration in books of such artist as Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Jocelyn Lee and Katy Grann. Olya left her office job, bought a medium format camera and started shooting portraits.
2. The artist has been always afraid of people and she assumes that maybe taking pictures is her way of overcoming this fear. Even when she communicates with people she watches them, observing. For the artist it is important to establish some kind of trust between her and people she takes pictures of. The advise she gives is: "Give someone space to bloom like a flower. Just do not push. And watch".
3. My attention was drawn to this artist's pictures because I recognized the environment of some of them. The ambient of the first pictures I've posted is the one of a Russian village, when people, most of them seniors, have preserved the old way of life. These pictures speak to me, because they remind me of my grandparents who used to live in a ambient like this long time ago. As she has mentioned, she used to think she was capturing a soul of a person or a "character" by taking someone's picture, but she realized it was nonsense: "We can only create our inner universe", meaning that we see a person in a certain way and our pictures can only project our reality. I completely agree with this statement. Rather than that, to be honest, I don't see anything remarkable in pictures of this particular artist. Maybe for me they are lacking emotions.Also, I have noticed that people on Olya's portraits usually don't smile and I wonder why.
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