When the renowned psychologist-turned-photographer Elizaveta Porodina answered my call, she was not at her desk or even indoors. Instead, she appeared bathed in sunshine, walking the tree-lined streets of Munich, the city she calls home. I haven’t been to Munich, I told her.
But our conversation, she offered, would double as a virtual tour. So, from my artificially-lit desk in New York, I was whisked away on an interview-length excursion into Porodina’s world—hardly the first time the artist has left an audience feeling transported. Porodina has the kind of one-line biography that holds a novel within itself.
Trained as a clinical psychologist, the Moscow-born photographer is known for creating portraits that invite both her subjects and audiences into vivid, surrealist dreamscapes. What began as a hobby–taking portraits of her friends–quickly evolved into a passion and eventually a career, her work always augmented with and deepened by her studies in psychology. Porodina’s experiments with light and color, her strong use of allegory and narrative symbolism, coax the subconscious to the surface.
Her just-released photography book, Elizaveta Porodina: Found Dreams, is a hardcover accumulation of her years exploring the bounds of reality and fantasy. As we toured Munich together through her iPhone screen, she told me how it came to be. GQ: Why did you decide to publish a book?
Elizaveta Porodina: What it really is for me, and I'm realizing it now, is that this was the end of a phase as a creative, and I cannot really put in words what I mean by that. Or maybe it is not just the end but also the beginning of something bigger, something more expansive. When I started putting the book in place, I definitely wasn't viewing myself at the end of anything at all.
But now it has happened, and I feel like it really was sort of the last line of a phase of seeing myself as this one thing—let's say, as mostly a photographer. Because during the phase of working on all these editorials, commissions, personal projects, there has been a huge throughline of writing narratives. Your work is clearly a kind of storytelling.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
