Elizaveta Porodina

The exhibition, along with the book that sort of unofficially accompanies it, are both a kind of collection of my radical change of mind that happened between, I guess, 2019 and the present moment, because I kept adding to the exhibition as it travelled through the different cities.
The radical change of mind was a kind of recollection of my ways of thinking, my patterns, and the things that I'm truly inspired and interested by, which include introspection, reflection on human nature, the ability of the human psyche and the human body to transform unapologetically, and the melancholy and darkness that accompanies all of it.
Even though these topics have always been present in my work, even when I wasn’t focused on them, I revisited them full throttle, unapologetically, and with focused intent. The exhibition was a great way of capturing them all in one bubble, one sphere, one room – in one experience for people.

You know what? I didn't have a hard time putting this exhibition together at all. I actually had the opposite experience. It was like the easiest birth ever; it kind of came out of me very naturally because I feel like the exhibition wasn't forced. Saying yes to it came as easily as saying yes to the book that we put together, like a tour de force, with the art director and the publisher. It just felt like the right moment. At the moment, I'm working on my next book, my next project, and, you know, as an artist, if you're really listening to your inner voice, you know when the time is right, you know when it’s not ripe yet. And it felt ripe. So nothing was hard; it was easy.

Yeah, I call it effortlessness. When I see something that I like in someone else’s work or in my own, the element I admire most is the effortlessness and ease as you mentioned. It's when the elements and textures come together so seamlessly that everything feels like one, and you can’t see the construction behind it because you’re so amazed by the wholeness of it.

I don't have any specific expectations. I often get asked this question, and my truthful answer is that I don’t want people to feel anything specific because everyone is different and comes from a different perspective and stage in their lives. My only hope is that people will feel something, think something, and that it will be fruitful ground for a discussion. So if people ask questions, to themselves or people who accompany them, or if something stays with them and they can ruminate on it and use it as something to chew on and they have to digest it longer, I think that’s great.
I sometimes feel like I live for the next amazing movie, or the next amazing music album, or painting, or photo that I see. Like this is what I look forward to most in my life: experiencing great art. If I can be that for someone else, if my art can be that, that’s the most I can wish for.

I think, you know, when I dissect my own work or someone else’s work and observe the ways of working, I find the most interesting works of art or products of creativity are multi-layered. Those are the ones I enjoy the most, both in food or in art, I just like a complex taste. It’s something that gives you a lot to look at and get through.
As you go through the layers, you can feel and touch and smell and look at different things. So one layer, superficially, can be beautiful and alluring and aesthetically pleasing — just something to enjoy, right? Then the next layer underneath can be the question mark. It can be more strange, more twisted, more dark, more ambiguous — more of a question mark than an exclamation point. That can be more on the conceptual level.
In that sense, clarity can come from the conceptual statement and ambiguity from the visual level, which can be literally blurred, or it can be the other way around. The photo can be very clearly defined in terms of aesthetics, but then the thing or person depicted might not be clear at all in terms of what or who they are. They might not be specifically just strong or just beautiful, but maybe they’re both things at the same time. A person can be, let’s say, troubled and potent at the same time.

That is a very important point because that's exactly how I learned art and how to appreciate it. I don't want to force anyone to only be able to enjoy my art if they can get through all the layers. I want to reach people at different points, even if it's just for the aesthetic point.

You know, I think the real explanation is that I guess I always meant to be an artist since I was a kid, and I was never meant to be a clinical psychologist. I think becoming a clinical psychologist happened in between. When I was young, I always painted and drew, wrote poems, sang — I wanted to be an opera singer, have a band, write, and act. I tried all of these things.
When I was around college age, I still had no idea exactly what I wanted to do as an artist. But I also felt pressure not to take a gap year because I just didn’t have the resources to cover that, and I wasn’t sure if a gap year would be enough — maybe I would need multiple years to figure it out. So, I looked at different things that I could study, and I saw clinical psychology. I was intrigued, and I had the grades to actually go through with it, so I started studying psychology, and I really liked it, but I just didn’t love it.
I studied it, became a clinical psychologist, graduated, and worked in a psychiatric [unit] for a couple of years. Around that time, during the practical segment of my education to become a therapist, I realised that it wasn’t the work with the patients where I didn’t see myself in the long run; it was more that I wanted to be something else — more than that. I just wanted to be an artist more than I wanted to be a psychologist. Maybe it’s selfish (laughs).

I think this is a question I can answer in two parts. Until recently, I would have said that I don’t necessarily do it on purpose, and if I do, it’s just because I know the material and it’s the natural way, you know.
But then I would also have said that I’ve learned a lot about human nature, communication, feedback, and reflection in psychology. And so, communicating with people on set, with the model, giving feedback, the appropriate kind of feedback, and being able to communicate myself in a way that I will be understood — I guess are skills I should be grateful to my studies for.
But I also recently found that, and this is a more recent development in my art, the more I direct my work towards my personal projects — which has become a bigger and bigger part of my activities — the more it is actually deeply rooted in my studies and what I learned, and in my interests. So I think these parts are starting to grow together quite seamlessly.

Yeah I see the person in front of the camera as a collaborator, in a very authentic, no-nonsense way. I feel that communication channel that is built between me and the model, and I feel how usually they are very open with me. That’s the person that can directly influence the image because they’re in this very vulnerable position. It doesn’t matter how young or inexperienced they are. If they’re there and willing to participate, they are given a chance and a place by me. I don’t view them as just a blank canvas that I can do whatever I want with.
It’s more of an amalgamation of my experiences and feelings as a person and their interpretation of it through their body and emotions. I have a huge respect for that because they become a vessel — more than just a vessel; it’s like a cocktail. It’s almost like a chemical reaction between their essence, my essence, and the essence of the team. That’s how I try to treat people.

I understand what you’re talking about. I've been thinking about this topic a lot, and I think that a huge part of the zeitgeist nowadays, independent of my image, is musing about what is relevant and interesting today. And I think a huge keyword is authenticity.
Someone being truthful to a moment, no matter how vulnerable it might make them, no matter how unexpected it is, no matter how personal it is. If it is truthful, then the audience can sense it on many different layers and in many different ways. The reward is an open communication tunnel between you and the audience, where they can really reflect it back to you, no matter how terrible it is, what you're saying and what it evokes in them, it is truthful and it can resonate. When people are just trying to do something out of a general thought that they think might be trendy or whatever, but they don't necessarily stand behind it, it also resonates, but in a very negative way, it gets rejected. It's almost like an alien body that gets pushed out of the cultural sphere.
So I think, in that sense, the evocativeness that you're talking about, I think it's the authenticity of it because I, or the models that I work with, or the people that I work with, we all try to be very truthful to what we feel and how we feel.

That’s a really interesting question, because I recently did a personal project just a couple of days ago, and I shot the entire thing in black and white, because that was the intention. I've been working with quite a lot of black and white projects in the last couple of months, which ended up being black and white because that was the right decision for them, because that was the certain mood I wanted to evoke and pay homage to, say, horror movies and illustrations and things like that.
So, the project I came back home to, I started looking at it and started working on the images and realised that at least half of the images needed to be in colour. The reason behind it is that I guess I work in a very intuitive way, above all stands my intuition and my inner voice, and just my trust in that intuition. It's less about concept. Even if I conceptualise the story to be entirely in black and white, if I come back home and look at it and feel that the image would benefit more from colour — if it conveys the idea and the feeling behind the image better with colour, or if the textures come together more effectively in colour, and they say more about the concept than black and white, then it has to be in colour.
A special interest of mine is colour theory and conveying different feelings through colours. Maybe sometimes I can see it in my specific unique way, and maybe the things I see are unique to me and my person.

I think, above all, there is an environment that I try to build for the person, for myself, and for everyone who participates in the shoot. By environment, I mean on all levels. On the physical level, there is an actual environment that I build, and it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s visible in the picture or just a corner of it; it will be understood on a subliminal level. The depth of the room and the different layers — the ground, the foreground, the middle ground, are all part of this.
On an intellectual level, there is also an environment that is built. By that, I just mean the narrative — a backbone of a story, a progression, and the dramaturgy. There is always a beginning, an introspective moment, a build-up to a climax, and then the end. I can always explain these moments to the model, the artists, or the set designers, everyone.
"This is the moment for the climax, so the makeup needs to be like that, the expression like this, and the set should react in a certain way."
I try to make all elements on the set — including the objects in the model’s hands and even the hair and makeup — I try to direct them to be very interactive. They’re not just decoration or embellishments of her physical beauty; instead they become reasons, actors, and pathways for things to happen, opportunities for doors to open. You know what I mean?

Yeah and by that, I want to stray as much as possible from any references or ideas that have been used before. I want the moment to happen naturally and uniquely.

You know, I didn’t find it challenging in that sense. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I feel challenged by many aspects of my activities, there are challenging moments within the shoot, sometimes in the pre-production, sometimes in post-production. Everything feels like a riddle to be solved or a problem to troubleshot. It's not that I don't find anything challenging, it’s just that switching between various activities isn’t challenging to me. I approach every shoot or project as something very individual. There will always be moments that make me feel uncomfortable or take me out of my comfort zone, so I just try to pinpoint what these moments are going to be and how they’re going to feel, in which ways I can prepare, and what aspects of my personality or character I can bring forward — and where I have to just be present and react to the moment authentically. That’s really it.

Yeah, but the confidence doesn’t come from me thinking I’m so great, it’s not like that at all (laughs). It’s more because I know that art-making, at its core, is an experiment. There are no guarantees anyway. If a person says that they go to a shoot and they just feel it’s going to be amazing no matter what, I guess that's an illusion. Even if you are a fashion photographer doing a typical fashion shoot with your usual setup, there can still be challenging moments.
So, the confidence comes from knowing that the most I can do for myself, apart from meticulous preparation, is to be present, show up to the challenges, and rise up to them. That’s all I can do as a human, and everything else is beside the point. That’s where the confidence comes from.
I think that foraying into different territories, for me at least, it has to be done. When you’re an artist, you have to explore different perspectives because you don’t want to die as an artist. Staying in a safe lane means you die artistically. There's no question about it — you just have to do it.