White. Not so white. 

The questions I asked myself when I conceived of this work were - is the camera or our eyes deceiving us? Is everything we see a constructed reality or a real one? And where do we look for the truth?

 

In our country, snow is perceived as an integral part of the national landscape, and it is associated with the processes of forming an all-Russian identity. I like the motifs of sleep, oblivion, death and the transience of life it includes. However, lyrical images do not prevent me from considering it from a physics point of view.

 

Human vision sees snow as white even if yellow sunlight falls on it. This is how the compensatory mechanisms of our brain work. In addition to white, snow has myriad shades of blue, gray, indigo, yellow, purple and crimson. How do they appear? They are due to the shape and density of snowflakes influenced by the environment, to the light angle of incidence and angle of reflection. The scattering indicatrix contributes to such a wide variety of shades.

 

Taking several pictures a day of the snow surface, I gathered the snow from the first, second, third and fourth ten-day intervals of winter into one complete product. The first was too dark, the second was windy, the third was lighter but exciting, and the fourth was incredibly rich in contrast, light and dirty. The work style I used in photography can be compared to intuitive painting, when you focus on internal impulses: mental or muscle, and you simply take pictures without trying to make sense of them. When putting the photos into a complete picture, I neither used color correction nor tried to create recognizable figures from the shots. I used a mobile phone to take pictures.

Яндекс.Метрика