Field for the sense

My project is a provocation. It is a long string of “blank” photographs that are missing a message, or the original subject.

All these pictures were taken by me during our 8 years of family travel. And this is only a small part of the archive that is stored on the hard drive.

Carefully cutting out the meaning of each photo, I leave only the sky. It acts as an indestructible constant, independent of any materiality, which we so carefully try to capture and thereby preserve in our memory. Time is merciless to everything: lands, reservoirs, cities, countries, people disappear and appear. And the sky - immutably and impartially symbolizes eternity.It looks the same everywhere: in Vietnam and in Tula: bright blue in sunny weather, and pale gray in cloudy weather.

The representative task of any tourist photography is to reproduce a landmark, generally recognized or subjective. Taking photographs on a journey, we seem to enter into a relationship with various objects: "And here I am at the Eiffel Tower, and here I go up to the roof of a skyscraper ...". Even 15 years ago, we proudly compiled photo albums from these pictures, bragged to friends and family. But today, when everyone travels, and everyone brings with them essentially the same shots, the ideas of which are borrowed from guidebooks and the Internet, photographs cease to be valuable, disappearing in the depths of computer memory. Moreover, the paradox of our time is that often the camera lens is ahead of the human eye. After all, seeing is not the main thing, the main thing is to photograph. And so, taking hundreds of pictures from each monument or colonnade in our pockets, we can hardly remember, but was there a monument?

The white field in my photographs thus represents a completely new visual space in which you can put anything you want. Moreover, if you do the same with your travel photos, they will be like two peas in a pod similar to mine, which means they will lose their identity, and, consequently, all value.

This is especially true in the context of the flared pandemic.

By working with travel photography as an object, I thus deprive it of its direct purpose: documentation in order to preserve it in memory. I want to abstract away from the visual value of these images in order to focus on the meaning of their creation. Before the pandemic, only my husband's brother did not travel, it seems to me. Everyone traveled very often. My husband and I went abroad up to 5 times a year.

In a year and a half of the pandemic, I traveled twice: by car to St. Petersburg and by plane to Sochi. Both times it was scary and uncomfortable. I returned home healthy - exhaled.

You can endlessly argue that politics is to blame for everything, think that Covid is a biological weapon, and so on and so on. But all this is pointless because this is the end. The end of the old reality. None of us can change anything, we can only adapt.

We will hardly be able to move in space with the same ease in the coming years. But what if traveling for a long time becomes as difficult for us as it was once in the 60s - 80s gold jewelry and jeans for our mothers and grandmothers? In this case, we should all the more to reconsider the value component of travel photography. Does it make sense to mindlessly clicking a button, or is it better to keep something worthwhile both in memory and in a snapshot?

Today I am looking for meaning in a new reality. The pandemic has changed everything, including the value of travel.

Previously, spending a vacation away from home meant seeing something new, unwinding. And now it is a breath of freedom that can be lost at any moment.

Will we be able to experience happiness, affection, admiration or fear again if we do not see any objects in the photo that allow us to experience anything? What remains with us: thousands of forgotten similar pictures illustrating the feeling, or the feeling itself?

Today I am looking for meaning in a new reality. The pandemic has changed everything, including the value of travel.

Previously, spending a vacation away from home meant seeing something new, unwinding. And now it is a breath of freedom that can be lost at any moment.