Being Loved Isn’t Easy For You

PERSONAL STATEMENT

I've always been interested in visual media as a way of storytelling. This interest evolved gradually while working as a photojournalist at a weekly news magazine in Georgia more than ten years ago, and developed while studying and working as a photo editor. When I made my first short fiction film, I realised I also wanted to approach photography differently. So I went on to explore its artistic side, shooting analogue -- 35mm as well as 120mm medium format films. I shoot film as I truly enjoy the anticipation of finding out what will show up. It works really well with (the concept of) my project - Being Loved Isn’t Easy For You - too. I want to shoot naked bodies without knowing in advance what is being depicted and how it will appear; I refuse to have immediate access to the image and I refuse to judge the photograph instantly. Instead, I want to match it with ‘real-time’ - the process of self-discovery is a slow one, and the process of slowly, almost blindly, working with film, goes hand-in-hand with it.

PROJECT STATEMENT

The series of Being Loved Isn’t Easy For You is a combination of abstract images and portraits. The abstractness acts like a screen - a metaphor for my own feelings about my body. Portraits then come in to show faces and to make eye contact.

I photograph people I'm close with. That puts me in a more vulnerable position when they take their clothes off than if they were strangers I've just met - that would just be a bit awkward. But I need the vulnerability to get what I'm trying to achieve and I only get it with the people I'm connected to.

It seems I'm more in control of the ones who feel vulnerable as that's familiar territory for me - I experience the same thing over and over again. But in my photographs, even if my subjects look fragile, they also radiate the power and liberation that can only be felt when you are comfortable with yourself in your own body. That’s the condition I aspire most to achieve and that’s the condition I search for in these photo shoots. It seems as if, through this observation, I get to discover myself and the force that controls me, the sexuality that I possess.

Alongside my nudes series, I'm slowly starting to develop a side project where I use photography as a medium to find a way to blur the line between gender signifiers. I'm trying to understand what features have previously defined us and our gender and then shoot photos that do not convey these dividing lines between “her” and “him”.