Your concept is interesting. It is deeply personal. I wonder is it too personal though. Photography, more so than written word can yield the truth – an unbiased visual of a moment in time. However even a moment captured on a strip of chemical film or digital sensor may not tell the truth. Your existence could have been anything really. Your fate you determine along with circumstance and location. Having looked at your essay a number of times over a number of days I surmise that your parents former existence isn’t a missing link, reality, or truth at all. I suspect that you don’t actually have a missing link. You are a product of what you are(hope you can follow me). You are fortunate to have had parents who escaped a situation. That very act negated any link to the places and people that you visited in respect to yourself. Perhaps a missing link for your parents(?). Your essay to my comprehension of the subject is thus simply a record of people and places in a certain part of the globe which happens to be the former areas which your parents once existed in. I apologise if I haven’t just ‘got it’ but maybe these thoughts are useful for you to contemplate and reassure your own understanding (even if my interpretation is wrong).

The photography is technically sound – you obviously wouldn’t be on display if it wasn’t. It is a genre which others may not like or get. I’m not overly engaged with the location shots. The people portrayed at the locations are interesting though.

Good luck in the selection process.

The photographs in this essay are simultaneously spare and lush. They balance rich explosions of color with an exactness of composition that is striking in such a young photographer. Emotionally, they balance on the perfect point between despair and beauty, and speak hauntingly of their coexistence. Having grown up in landscapes of similar desolation and poverty, I appreciate the photographer’s courage to look at them unflinchingly. To frame them, yes, but not to aestheticize them. There are plenty who will document the well to do, or give the standard pull-on-the-heartstrings contrast story. This essay allows these people and places to stand on their own, without explanation or apology. To the commentator who asks what kind of heart the photographer has, I’d suggest that his own heart is the one malfunctioning. Anyone who can look at these pictures without feeling, has probably not lived or significantly encountered this kind of life. To demand that the photographer make their suffering ‘accessible’ or ‘moving’ strikes me as perverse. Why should their lives be turned into emotional fodder for consumption?

No, the photographer does not draw a final conclusion for us. No, she has not made the lives of her subjects ‘accessible’ to us, for the truth is, for most of us this kind of daily diminishing of expectations is not accessible. Grigorenko does something better. She let’s the people and places stand for themselves. Unvarnished. Not concerned with pleasing us, telling us their feelings, or making us their best friends. Nor does she make them the cause for a heart jerking emotional appeal. To me, this indicates more respect for her subjects and their daily lives, not less.

In the end, these pictures are not only technically excellent, they also accomplish something that indicates maturity of vision – the ability to sit with what is ambiguous or uncomfortable without trying to make it be something else.

I felt nothing from the pictures, the statement intrigued me, but I felt no connection between the two.

I’ve no idea how infantile this project is, but it is far from anything I believe the photographer actually wanted it to be… I could be wrong?

“rather than finding the country my parents had told me about, I am meeting the self/selves I could have been.”

I’m not sure if this is the case? I don’t actually know what the parents told stories of but, given the imprisonment and persecution I don’t think it could have shed a nice light on it. One problem I have with this project at this stage is that the connection with russia and the opinion of it is possibly more warped than that of westerners with their anti commi crap.

The other problem is that I don’t care where it’s going, I’m not interested in the book with the journal entries, I just don’t care. But if the pictures were better, if the background information were I might.

Obviously this is personal. All of the images are fairly well executed. But I yearn to know the “inside story”. I’m not accustomed to looking at images over and over to try to understand them, but yet I must. This work has been deemed worthy of consideration for an EPG!

I see abandonment, I see neglect, I see people waiting, existing. There’s not a future, the present is grim, cold. It’s not hopeless because I see no hope only existence. As an auto-biographical fantasy it’s a bad dream.

I think maybe this is too personal for me to understand. It doesn’t explain anything, It does not right a wrong. So I guess the only way to find out what all of this means is to wait until Tatiana completes her journey. Win or loose I think we all will eventually see where and what her journey concludes.

Phew, I’m exhausted.

You are supposed to be critiquing the girl’s work, not showboating your supposed grasp of the English language.

Could you tell me what “dyadic” means?

The whole thing sounds like sour grapes to me.

Tatania, your work is perhaps not in the same league as a couple of the other essays, but that does NOT mean you don’t deserve to be amongst them.

Well done, and good luck.

Andrew

So does it work? Not for me: perhaps it’s just too personal. The photographer states “I hope to complete with an EPF grant and eventually publish as a book of images juxtaposed alongside text culled from personal journal entries.”. I would have liked to see how this would work with examples from journals already collected and would imaging that the judges would too.

Tatiana, congratulations on being in rarified company!

Best wishes,

Mike.

However, what struck me was the way you see the post-Soviet reality. I find it somewhat influenced by other people’s perceptions. Visually it makes me think of Luc Delahaye’s “Winterreise” in particular. Emotionally it was probably inflienced by your parents’ own attitude towards the Soviet Union which they fled. I hope through this photographic project you will find the answers to the questions that seem to be of utter importance to you.

Good luck in your journey to locate the place(s) where you belong and congratulations on being selected an EPG finalist.

Just keep going!

Patricio

I am a big fan of your work

You touch me and I hope you will go to win !