Julia Lazumirska

   I am a lens-based artist living and working in Kiev, Ukraine. The path to photography started from another profession (from the economic and legal field) and from another role (I was a housewife for many years). A period of honest questions to myself has begun in my life, and the camera has become the instrument that allowed to release the accumulated and unrealized creative energy outside.

  My visual language development were strongly influenced by aesthetics of modernism, especially by the work of an American artist Georgia O'Keeffe as well as the Japanese understanding of imperfect beauty, the reconciliation of people with nature. I also admire the work of such photographers as Masao Yamamoto, Harry Callahan, Edward Weston, Irving Penn, Ralph Gibson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mona Kuhn.

    For me, the creative photography is a non-judgmental observation of the visible external world and the hidden inner world of the soul, which I portray, collect and study in the form of photographs. My pictures are always a compromise between the earthly and the understandable, as well as the existential and the mysterious, they convey the ghostly beauty of a more subtle world, which we do not see physically, but can only feel through our transcendental filters and channels.

   Nature and people are main objects of inspiration and observation. My experience are interpreted through the lines, shapes, forms, colors, and at a certain moment, often accidental and unexpected, I get pictures, which I am ready to share with the world. In lines, forms, shapes, I see the static and timeless part of existence, and the colors express an emotional feeling of movement. In my practice, I usually use close-ups and experiment with color during shooting or in post-processing stage. The flowers with which I associate my thoughts and feelings often become silent witnesses of internal dialogues with myself.

    The theme I am focusing on is human existence: Who are we, as «human beings of the 21st century», what is «the new spirituality». I explore it through my feelings in the process of self-determination, self-awareness and integrate it into a general holistic picture of the world.

   Despite the fact that some of my pictures appear as a result of mental struggle, they are not about struggle, but about acceptance as a form of respect for life. All my works are my self-portraits at the same time. However, the act of self-knowledge is not so important than the moment when the viewer finds a part of himself in my photos. I would like that both processes of creativity and contemplation there are a unification of different people through a common "feeling of the moment".