Hanna Filipicheva
Kiev | Ukraine
BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1991, in Donetsk, Ukraine, I felt the burgeoning impetus to capture the objects I was drawn to at the age of about 5. My first “camera” was a blusher mirror of my mom and the second was made of clay by my dad when we were on holiday at the seaside. Since then, my tools have evolved a lot but remained mostly analogue: all these years I have been a proponent of film photography. In 2013, I got an MA degree in philology and spent 3 years teaching the history of Western literature at university, following the forced resettlement due to the military conflict in the East of Ukraine. The turbulent times did not dampen my sensitivity in both literary studies and photography but contributed to a keener sense of the moment and the transience of experiences. Like poetry, photography conveys the essence of things as they happen. My method is to capture the fleeting moment of the existence of people or things in their natural circumstances without artificially arranging or affecting them. Life per se is of interest to me. Quite often, I serendipitously discover a link between my photos and poems I enjoy, which enables me to combine my philological background with photography. I consider photography to be a different sort of text, the one written with light. As much as any language is a system of symbols encoding complex concepts and communicating the most subtle relations between people and things, photography encrypts and preserves the visual narrative as seen by a person behind a camera. Both the language and photography are media transmitting powerful ideas that can be revealed and deciphered across cultures and times. Far from being incompatible, poetry and photography defy the constraints of time and may complement and enrich one another. Uprooted in 2014 by war, I have lived in Ukraine and Italy. At the moment, I am braving the COVID-19 pandemic in Kyiv, Ukraine.