VLAD GANSOVSKY

When have you starting photography and under what circumstances?

I held the camera from the childhood. I was allowed to take my father’s camera and photographed all that I could see around. But it was childhood at all. Then he has presented my first camera for me. Especially I was bewitched with process of photocopying in a dark room. Those times, in the Soviet Union there was no concept - a photolaboratory. Everyone printed photos himself. However, it was temporarily children's hobby. Nevertheless, all my life from the childhood I consider myself the artist and sought for different ways of self expression. Later, in institute I studied drawing and painting and design. Then, already keeping in mind mature ideas and images, I drew my attention to a photo again as to the instrument of expression of my ideas and feelings.

You are mostly tackling a naturalism related with pregnancy, motherhood, obese characters.What lies behind this approach of yours?

I am tired from mannered inconvenient sexual poses with which dazzle modern magazines, picture albums, exhibitions. I disagree that pregnancy, corpulence are less beautiful. Everything is not so unambiguously there. Beauty is rather and rather relative concept. In different times there were different ideals of beauty. I want to be out of fashion. And there is a joke in Russia - 90 % of men actually love crummy women, and the other 10 % - very crummy. Both pregnancy and motherhood have their own peculiar beauty. Pregnant women are filled with the special powerful energetics.

You seem quite attracted towards most out-of-common experiments, which are upsetting for the regular onlooker, accustomed with gentler images. Which is the goal of such experiments?

Well, in general I do not try to do my creative work convenient for perception of an audience. I’m the confirmed egoist, i.e. I do the creativity, first of all, for myself. Any work of art can be considered in two aspects - form and content. Both these aspects are important for final perception of work. The purpose of my experiments is search of interesting forms of the expression suitable for the content.

How do the public and the critics perceive your photographs?

There are no indifferent people! There are staunch fans and opponents among viewers and critics. The senior generation is certainly less tolerant. Soviet Union has stopped its lifetime in 90-th year; I was in that time 13 years old and I couldn’t take nude photos. And since then we have the great freedom of action there.

Is there anyone particular you would like to work with?

I’m always in search of nonordinary persons as models. The more they are out of the common, both outwardly, and inwardly, the more interesting. I have a quantity of ideas feasible only with the concrete very specific models in way of appearance.

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