Fresh Eyes

Stories - Victoria Ushkanova

ARTIST'S BODY - VICTORIA USHKANOVA

Author LINDA ZHENGOVÁ

Artist VICTORIA USHKANOVA

Instagram @victoria_ushkanova

Website victoriaushkanova.com

Victoria Ushkanova (Russia) is an autodidact photographer and media artist currently based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her main focus is portrait and fashion photography. In her project ‘Artist’s Body’, she explores the acceptance of the human body in the form of a video performance which later extends to her photographs.

Her photographic oeuvre presents portraits of adolescents where her models are either from modelling agencies or sometimes complete strangers. With a clear talent for direction, Ushkanova always takes many pictures until she reaches the right moment and designates a photograph to be “the one”. Characterised with sharpness, her portraits are shot on a large format analogue camera, allowing for an incredible range of colour reproduction and sense of depth.

We are not fully aware of the fact that every day we interact hundreds of images. It is difficult to define which images are created by our imagination and which ones appear from the outside. Moving in the cobweb of phantoms, sometimes we slide on a tangent, sometimes we let something through us and at times something audaciously stays and accumulates inside us. It is the very quintessence of images that an artist deals with. So that when the interaction will exhaust itself, he can set them free.