WHO?
I’m a photographer and process-oriented psychologist. I live and work in St. Petersburg, Russia. I have always loved the books of Arnold Mindell, and when I started getting into street photography, his book “Dreammaker’s Apprentice” was my favorite one. The name of the book perfectly mirrored how I felt when I wandered around with my camera, searching for I don’t know what. I was a dreammaker’s apprentice, and there was somebody or something much bigger than me, without whose help there was no sense in any pictures. It was a kind of conversation, a way of talking with the world.
Later, when I started to study process work seriously, I learned that in the process psychology model there are several channels of perception, and one of them is the world channel! We all have visual, audial, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic channels and we have the world channel as well – we perceive information not only through vision, listening and feeling, but sometimes we get immediate messages from the world. The world is a channel for a man, and a man is a channel to the world – it’s just amazing! For me photography always was a way of letting this messages in the world channel reveal itself. So for me, street photography always was a kind of process work.
WHAT?
I never know what in advance. It should tell me itself – picture me, just as bottles in Alice’s adventures told her to drink them. I just go on to the street and ask the world – amuse me today, please! And then I walk and I turn on my attention – my first attention and my second attention as well. The first attention includes perception of what I see and hear, of anything that attracts me consciously. The second is more subtle, it refers to what I cannot name, I can just feel it smoothly. Something flirts with me – it can be a color, or a person, or a situation, almost anything, – and I follow it, and then something more often happens, something unexpected. I can find it much later, looking at a picture at home, but there always have to be something more that what I’ve seen in the moment. Above I suggested that if an image reveals itself to me, there is a message—it’s how the world channel works. And it’s so exciting to unfold these messages after the fact!
WHEN?
When I have the free time and inspiration, that’s all. Lately, there is much less of both of them, but I can’t help that. I have to be open to the world and must be able to ask everything unnecessary to get out of my head and became more visual-oriented and in the same time enter into more dreaming state of mind. So to take pictures I must not be caught up in everyday problems.
WHERE?
Everywhere where I find myself, there is no non-interesting places. Each place on the Earth has its own spirit, its own deep mind, if I can use this word here. And when I arrive in an unfamiliar place, I meet a new spirit of the place there, and if I’m able to take some pictures there or not depends not only of myself, but on that spirit as well. In new places it feels much stronger, in familiar places you become used to it, and it’s very easy to forgot that there is the spirit of the place too, and he (or she) always participates in your walks and in your pictures.
WHY?
It’s hard to explain. To be honest, I don’t know why. Why does the wind blow, why does a bird sing? I can rationalize it, of course, but when I try to, I don’t believe myself. But maybe something inside me knows, and something outside me, something that is everywhere, something bigger. You know, Alfred Einstein once said that he would like to know God’s thoughts. I think that a good wish for an artist is to be God’s eyes.
