JENYA KAPITSKY - ABOUT MY ART
I began to take pictures when I was ten and I got my first Smena camera. Some 5-6 years later It became a serious interest of mine. I have extensive background in puppetry, theatre props and masks creation, embroidery, knitting, ceramics, felting and I always enjoy finding new fields I can explore.
I'm a photographer and a painter. I prefer colours to lines. I don't like to use photoshop – just sometimes to clean the dust or the scratches from the scans before printing them. All the photos here are not staged except for the series "Vintage". I was just lucky enough to catch these moments and to get them transferred into the frame.
Many things simply happen to us. We meet the most important people and remember the dearest moments almost haphazardly. Memory itself seems to be made of sudden glances that decide to stay with us forever. I am learning to capture them, to explore the mechanisms of suddenness, memory, and strokes of good luck.
For years, my life has been closely connected with theatre. I see theatre as a way to measure time and give proportion to experiences and emotions, linking personal with broader human history. It creates a meeting point between the local and the global, the particular and the universal, allowing us to compare our excitement and dramas to those of other people and other times. It highlights what is most important, underlines connections, and reveals both similarities and differences.
Photography works in a similar way. By cutting a fragment out of the continuous flow of life, it isolates details from their context and reshapes their meaning. Chance plays a role too: coincidences caught in the frame may appear purposeful, and we instinctively build connections and explanations for them. From these fragments, we imagine the past and reflect on our own place within it.
There are also other qualities that bring photography and theatre together. In theatre, the audience, the actors’ emotions, and their interpretation of the play all combine to form a unique, unrepeatable performance. In photography, light, subject, setting, and the photographer’s presence converge in a similar way. Just as actors must fully inhabit each moment on stage, responding sincerely to every stimulus and to other actors, every element in photography – moving or still – must function authentically. If any part fails to “live,” the work feels false. Both theatre and photography raise questions and suggest possibilities, inviting the viewer to complete their part of the experience through reflection, attention, and sensory engagement.
I work in both photography and painting, with a deep focus on landscapes. What fascinates me is the conjunction of light, form, memory, and gaze, meeting at a single point of space and time. Because structure of the brain, perception mechanisms, and cognitive systems are similar among people, it is likely that someone else might respond to the same elements that moved me to take the picture. Yet the associations and memories connected to the image, which led me to take it in the first place, may be very different from mine.
photo by Irma Sharikadze
Frequently, memory makes us recognize one place in a photograph as if it were another – is this illusion, self-deception, artistic transformation, or simply a dream? Both photography and memory deal with moments that already past, fragments torn from the continuous flow of life. They let us construct imaginative realities that may differ from the original moment, guided by rules we sometimes prefer to those of actual life. We may be aware of these shifts, or they may remain unconscious, shaping how we see and treat images without realizing it. I often think of Marcel Proust, in In Search of Lost Time and his essays on architecture, and try to find ways to realize his ideas in my art.
I share Walter Benjamin’s view (A Little History of Photography, 1931) that photography should not copy reality or compete with it but instead create “instant paintings” that sometimes deform reality to emphasize the author’s vision. To begin with, since I work mainly in black and white, the absence of color is already a distortion of reality. In my opinion, when photographs are in color, neither film nor digital cameras can completely succeed in transmitting it. This failure is partly due to how we perceive images in our field of vision: we always see colors in relation to one another. However, photographic frame preserves only portion of it, and then copies it in isolation. In addition, just like painting, photography tries to convey movement, but both are technically limited in this, so the result is rarely successful – though the goal always remains tempting.
Art objects have an advantage over their descriptions: they act directly on the senses. The most powerful works are often those that rely less on analytical tools, affecting the viewer in ways that are stronger and less predictable. Conceptual art, by contrast, tends to produce more controlled and foreseeable effects – perhaps explaining its current popularity.