Photos by Liudmila Timofeeva
Liudmila Timofeeva comes from a hectic Siberian city Krasnoyarsk (thatís in the heart of Russia), where this very moment it is already +10C only, though itís the middle of August. Being 20 years old, she has not completely chosen her path yet, because she enjoys versatility. She studies international economics at Siberian Federal University, engages in research in philosophy of art and works as a freelance photographer. Liudmila grew interested in photography in childhood. She took up photography the moment her dad passed her an old analogue Zenithî camera and got out to the streets to take her first analogue city photographs. Her main interest is the city, its life, its people and its stories. She enjoys travelling and depicting diversity of cities and unique atmosphere that each city around the world has. Her previous year has been spent in the USA at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS, where she studied international relations, philosophy, and black and white photography. That is when she got interested in analogue photography experiments in darkroom, which is reflected in this project.
The project is called Rayograms: lines, shapes and a little bit of mystery. A rayogram (which is sometimes referred to as a photogram) is an image created in a darkroom, with the use of objects, light, photographic paper and standard photographic chemicals. Such image does not have any negative or positive and can be produced once only. This creates a great value for such works, as they cannot be reproduced or reiterated analogously, thus each image is unique. Trying to be concrete is sometimes what distracts one from the real nature of an object, especially when this object is the person, the self, the character. That is when abstraction comes in handy. Rayograms are helpful abstractions. The project can work as a switch of imagination, the same way as those ink blot psychology tests trigger a person to get all sorts of associations. Each work has open concept and is designed in such a way that each individual can cognize something new about himself or herself. To reveal the undisclosed in themselves, people should explore hidden feelings, thoughts and emotions one has about himself or herself; they should find themselves in the atmosphere one experiences in a dream: slightly enigmatic, not necessarily making sense at a glance.
