1st place winner the ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ 3D virtual exhibition
Over 20 years of fine art photography experience within artistic, psychological, vintage, family portraits, and boudoir series in unique, easily-recognizable style.
Tell us a little about yourself and your background?
"My name is Alexander Ivashkevich, I am a professional theater and movie actor and a photo artist living in Tallinn, Estonia. For the last 20 years, I’ve been into photography professionally. As a photoartist, I work mainly in two directions: portrait and boudoir photography. My interest in fine art and photography was instigated by my life-long career in the dramatic theater sphere.
I think that curiosity about life, the ability to pay attention and analyze everything that is going on around may be considered as the background of every creative person. It seems to me absolutely natural that with age, an artist acquires his own so-called “inner art-gallery”, cultivating a taste and consequently, the right to present his/her vision of the world to a wide audience".
Artwork: Born to Seduce.
How did you get started in photography?
"Photography has always been interesting to me. And, as I said before, being an actor and being constantly surrounded by people I started to feel inspired by them. Besides this, my desire to shoot my own movie forced me to look differently through the camera lens. This was a logical starting point to start photographing people in order to better understand their inner life".
Artwork: Rejection.
How do you choose your subjects, how they're dressed, and how they pose?
"My models are mostly people who are not connected to professional modeling. It is always more interesting to me to photograph ordinary people, our contemporaries, people of different professions, ages, destinies and characters. I meet people with different appearances, sizes, different levels of self-confidence, young and old ones…
For many people posing is one of the most difficult and challenging components of the whole process of a photo session.
To discover the character of a model, to show the personality, to highlight individuality, gentleness, or sexuality – completely different tasks in each photo shooting session, and it is always a challenge to reveal a person's hidden potential by means of a psychological approach towards investigating people’s characters during a photo session.
Portrait photography is interesting because of its suddenness, that’s why I am convinced that we should avoid the “special posing”. A person needs to naturally find a suitable pose and this is often born from a particular situation itself.
The most important thing for me during a photo shoot is to show the inner potential of a model despite her age. The roles and characters are created specially for each person participating in a photo shoot. This inner potential is revealed during a photo session and opens the hidden emotional capacity of a person. Moreover, that is a superior opportunity to look at yourself from the outside.
As for the boudoir - this theme is very complicated because of its candor and there is always a danger of crossing the line of good taste and turning the result of the photo shoot into vulgarity.
When it comes to dresses…I have a big collection of different vintage dresses and usually I have some kind of a concept of what one or another model would wear. Models try different dresses during a photo session and together we find something that makes a model feel very special and unique.
Quite often people do not see themselves in one or another dress, but after trying it on and seeing themselves from the side, they understand that the photographer made it possible for them to change their mind".
Artwork: Stranger.
How would you define your photographic style?
"Well, I think that the most correct way to define my photographic style is to call it “showing to the modern world all the good things from the past times, revealing the pure natural beauty and the inner world of people despite their age, professions, characters and destinies.
"I am strongly inspired by painters of the past: Leonardo da Vinci, Pre-Raphaelites, and Impressionists and their vision of the world resonates with me. That's why viewers often call my photo works paintings".
Artwork: Spring.
What do you hope the response is when viewers see your work?
"The opportunity to feel yourself in a different manner is worth a lot. When the viewer sees such faces, he wishes to understand what is happening at the present moment, what has happened before and after the creation of this picture. That is the power of photography – to present a riddle. That is exactly what keeps a person in front of the photos. The mystery of the human soul cannot be represented by standard smart-phone filters".
Artwork: Untitled II.
What message would you like to share with other young photographers who are at the beginning stages of their careers?
"My message to young photographers who are just beginning – nothing is more effective for professional development than the ability to learn and analyze the works of other photographers, artists and the world-renowned masters. I think that there are a lot of possibilities to become a technically professional photographer, but only an interesting and deep internal position of a photographer as a human being, will help to reveal your own potential and climb professionally some steps higher.
We are all students, we first begin to mimic others, then we try to surprise the world; but it seems to me, that first of all we need to use the camera to discover the world for ourselves, learn to see and feel it, and then present our vision of it to others".
Artwork: Untitled I.
Alexander Ivashkevich (b. 1960).
Over 20 years of fine art photography experience within artistic, psychological, vintage, family portraits, and boudoir series in unique, easily-recognizable style.
17 personal (in Estonia, Latvia and Russia) and 9 collective exhibitions (in Estonia, Germany, Italy, Monaco, UK, Hong Kong), including participation in Biennale Fondazione Modigliani in Venice (2022). Many works are owned within private collections in Germany, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, UK, and USA.
All photo works are framed individually. He also works in the verre églomisé technique that creates exclusive pieces of fine art.
His works are recognized and mentioned by LensCulture, Vienna International Photo Award 2022, Espana Photo Award 2022, PhotoVogue, and SaatchiArt.
Published in October’s issue of Art Market International Art Magazine
SaatchiArt: https://www.saatchiart.com/Aliv1960
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alivfote
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