When in St Albans, I was taking photos of creator Lena dressed in something that looked a lot like a reminiscent of the iconic Westwood's 1981 pirate collection which gave me a great deal of excitement. Although, to be fair, garments did not stand out as much as the changing women's exterior in front of me at that time. A beautiful sight. It is always a pleasure to take photos of someone that expressive and confident in motion. Her portraiture spoke for itself and suggested me the ideas of how her photography project on women really is a product27 of her ambiguous identity. By capturing people's faces including herself in the least exposed corners of domesticity, Lena gifted me with an interesting observation of how the rare and usually overseen layers of character are being embraced in the light, shifting people's perspectives on stigmatised beauty standards, finally letting us see women as solitary complex universes when all we knew about them was mostly sisters, mothers, wives. Find her photography works on Facebook or Instagram.
"Taking photos is my therapy. I search, I find and I loose parts and pieces of myself in the process. /Women/ is a series that doesn't celebrate a gender but the flexible dough of our mindset. It does refer to femininity but even if I make use of the physical curves to express it, I'm all the time in the hunt for the beauty of change and self recognition. It also happens many times that the roles exchange, leaving me to be the captured, gazing at the canvas in front of me. I'd like to have as many nudes, undress the people that pose for me, and that is because I am crazy about how beautiful nature twists and turns its creatures. Cameras can be quite intimidating. I know it well, as I've sat myself in front of many and it took courage to stand still and look straight through it, and as an obvious fact I relate to it as much. We are like maps and it takes a good explorer to discover us. And so, this idea of /women on the loose/ is directly extracted from my personal series of women portraits, as a result of their courage to pose, to expose and express the beauty of vulnerability, of letting go, of loosening up. There's much freedom after that breaking point giving me a great privilege of witnessing it." - Lena Karenina
𝔏𝔐
