[slidepress gallery=’tatianagrigorenko-missinglink’]
Hover over the image for navigation and full screen controls
Tatiana Grigorenko
Missing Link
Emerging Photographer Fund – FINALIST (number six of eleven)
My parents fled the Soviet Union in 1976, where they had been dissidents, their families persecuted and imprisoned many times over. They ended up in New York, political refugees with no nationality, and there I was born: an American citizen to stateless parents, with my mother proudly holding up my infant head for the picture in the family’s first US passport. I grew up with one foot in an imaginary country: a country defined by the Russian I spoke at home, the food I ate, the songs I listened to and of course, the stories my parents told– but a country, nonetheless, that could never have a real physical existence. My parents were too scared to ever return, even for a short visit.
Haunted by this incomplete picture, I set out to meet the imaginary country face to face. Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Estonia, Russia …. Everywhere I go, I meet dozens of new faces, and in each one of them I recognize women I could have known, men I could have loved, places that could have been familiar. I am chasing a phantom: rather than finding the country my parents had told me about, I am meeting the self/selves I could have been.
An invented self-portrait, a fictional autobiography, unfolding in a country that no longer exists ….
These are images from a long-term project that I hope to complete with an EPF grant and eventually publish as a book of images juxtaposed alongside text culled from personal journal entries. The final result should, of course, serve as testimony to the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union, but I hope that the viewer will also, by sharing the author’s own experience, question the very notion of how we define ourselves.
Bio:
Tatiana Grigorenko was born in 1980 in New York City. After a brief stint as a professional ballet dancer in New York and Paris, she graduated from Amherst College in 2003 with a BA in Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing her MFA in photography at Yale University School of Art. She lives and works between New York, New Haven and Paris.
Tatiana’s work has been exhibited in New York City (Thomas Werner Gallery), in Paris, France (Galerie Bailly Contemporain), in New Haven, Connecticut (Yale University Art Gallery and Green Hall Gallery), in Amherst, Massachusetts, in Treviso, Italy and in Carmel, California.
Tatiana was recently named a 2009 Emerging Photographer by the Magenta Foundation and has received numerous awards and fellowships, most notably from the American Society of Media Photographers, the National Geographic Society and a grant from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation for her project ‘Missing Link’. She has completed residencies at Fabrica, the Benetton artistic research center and at the Eddie Adams Workshop and has taught photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.
In addition to her artistic work, Tatiana shoots for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Redux Pictures agency and the Bloomberg News agency, among others. Her work appears in publications internationally.
Related links
Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..
Many thanks… david alan harvey
Recent Comments