. : : ARTIST STATEMENT : : .
Natalia Urazmetova is a photographic artist originally hailed from Ufa, Russia. In 1997 left the native city in the Urals for Moscow, where she studied Humanities, Language and Foreign Literature at the school. Afterwards she entered The Higher School of Economics and graduated with honours, receiving a specialist degree in International Law. Professional background includes work within the mass-media and entertainment industry as an art-journalist and event-manager assistant. A long-standing and passionate engagement with art and ardent predisposition toward photography has allowed her to continue education, primarily focusing on creative undertakings and acquiring the theoretic knowledge. Currently a second year undergraduate student on BA (Hons) Photography course in London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Photography has a potential to describe so much: the richness of tone, the sensual form and exquisiteness of things, all the great wealth of detail and the grandeur of momentous events, but there is never any final and absolute explanation in the image we stare at. Whatever the image reveals - dramatization of the innermost sensuality, fragilities of the unique human experience or the opulence of a scenery – this revelation is always both fragmentary and temporal, inherent in the very core of photography.
Stylistically, the photographic work embraces such genres as fine-art, documentary, performance, music and travel photographic.
The conceptual basis of the imagery is a multifaceted one and primarily framed around the connotations of human existence, relationship between the past and the present, the dimensions of the unconscious and spontaneous. By encountering the remnants of the past such as deserted buildings, antiques treasures and relics and contrasting them with the modern objects the artist is aiming to recalibrate relation between the past and the present. This is an endeavour to portray the reconciliation of the past and the present and to show the cultural interchange between them.
Another dimension of my photographic work presumes exploration and visualization of urbanscape as a plane of cultural representation and social interaction, its ephemeral essence and accelerated social rhythms, the unexpected juxtapositions of everyday life, and the tropes of the human existence. Alongside with multifaceted conceptual framework, the images tend to emphasize and celebrate an emotional richness and sensual potential of photography as the medium of communication.
The journey, the chance occurrence, fascination with cityscape and commonly ignored details of it, emphasis on the idea of human presence in absence and the everyday, the intersection between the past and the present – these are key features to the personal expressive vocabulary. The goal is to devise an accessible, readable yet complex and emotionally saturated visual structure that gives the viewer the opportunity to associatively collaborate. By the means of photography the artist creates out of fragmentary moment its own permanence.
The American art-critic and essayist Lincoln Kirstein once admitted: A grand openness of vision is the only signature of great photography. He proclaims that photographer’s principal goal is to catalogue the facts of the epoch with a creative attitude and a clean eye. Such a statement predetermines the imperatives of my creative attitude. Besides, reality does not come framed with ready-made meaning, everything hinges for the photographer on determining a point of view. From the innumerable possibilities of the gaze the photographer must, through the viewfinder of the camera, define a segment so as to interpret the visible and make its perplexed lay-out and an otherwise invisible transparent. Hereby, photography is an art of reduction and emphasis. Photographs perform an exclusively dual function as a carrier of a message and vessel for emotions and aesthetic pleasures. My visual messages remain left to the viewers’ imagination to speculate on the meaning of metaphors within each frame. So far in my photographic work I am trying to follow this ideology and artistic grammar.
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2008 - Prix de la Photographie Paris
Honorable Mention Recipient of PX3 2008 Competition in 3 categories:
Book Proposal/Documentary - Detached & Recalled Project
Fine Art/Landscape - The Frozen Equilibrium Project
Photojournalism/Performing Arts - The Good, The Bad & The Queen show
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2007 - International Photographic Awards
Honorable mention in Editorial in non-professional category for "Ghostland" project.
natalia urazmetova
fine art & documentary photography