Anna Kudryavtseva’s exhibition, The Space of Silence, 18 April – 26 May 2019

The photographs by Anna Kudryavtseva, an icon painter and photographer from the Pskov region in Russia, show magical mysterious primeval forests. This is pure, everyday country life, where the viewer may get the feeling that the people captured in the pictures are continuing their daily routine without even noticing that they have been wrapped in a soft fog rich in oxygen exhaled by the landscape surrounding them covered in primeval forests. This exhibition speaks of forests and forest landscapes that the forest itself has designed at its own discretion, and of daily chance encounters between man and forest.

Artist tells about her creative process:

“My profession is iconographer. I first became seriously interested in photography in 2013. Photography for me is primarily a means of creating and expressing an artistic image. The figurative, semantic content and internal state is the main thing that I try to convey in each photographic composition, regardless of the genre, be it portrait, landscape, just something casually thrown away and forgotten, or a dry faded flower. The process of taking photographs for me is a sort of meditation – an attempt to find beauty in the ordinary and at the same time a chance to abandon the everyday fuss and delve into myself.

In my photographs, I would like to reflect the presence in the outside world of a higher, spiritual principle, filling every millimetre of our universe with life and beauty, and at the same time reminding you of the fragility of creation, its vulnerability and pain from colliding with the forces of destruction.

I observe the breath of this life both in the amazing change of the states of nature, which may appear in the mysterious silence of a foggy morning, or the soft light of the last ray of the setting sun, and in the constant movement of time, disposing of the old and bringing in the new, as well as the continuity and contradiction of light and shadow. Everything lives and breathes, shimmering with magical pictures; you must only notice them.

Portraits and taking pictures of people are particularly important for me. To show the inner world of a person and their inner, spiritual beauty, while emphasizing their individual features, is a very difficult but surprisingly exciting task that inspires me to look for new approaches and new expressive forms in photography.

One of my recent works involved making a series of portraits and genre shots photographed during a visit to the festival called “Setomaa. Family meetings” in the village of Sigovo (Pechora district, Pskov region). Becoming more closely acquainted with representatives of the small Seto ethnic group and the beauty of their folk traditions aroused an interest in ethnic photography, which I would like to pursue extensively in the future.”