Aquaphotographiya (wip)
While photographing of broken, old buildings in today’s reality and state, I caught myself on feeling that I would like to move some of them to a fictional reality and I decided to do it with brushes and watercolors. I started painting ruins putting them in random scenes, where they never have been. But being both painter and photographer I was missing a photographic documentary authenticity, which I was observing during shooting. One day I realized that I was missing the unification of these two disciplines in a single image, and I merged them. So my first ‘aquaphotographiya’ was born. At this point I understood that this symbiosis of painting and photography allowed me finally to tell the story of ruins completely. Manual painting and digital photography complement each other and resulted in a hybrid image filled with abstraction and realism at the same time. Looking at them, it is difficult to determine where photography ends and painting begins - they mingle together. I picked ruins out of their normal reality and gave them a new form of life in nonexistent world, full of abstractions, unspoken words and dreams. Shadows and lights mixed to each other, creating chaos, real shapes flew into picturesque outlines, as if we observe dreams and reality at the same time. Regret, helplessness, pain, absence of any hope for objects lost in time and desire to keep them in memory of at least one person, who will always return to them.