Portraits that transform people into whatever they want to be | Uldus Bakhtiozina

I'm often asked

why I do art,

what do I want to say with my art photography,

and what is the use of it?

Once in a while I start to worry

how to actually measure the impact from the art

like we do with medicine or technology,

where we can see the results and calculate it.

Then I would finally be able to explain to my mother my art

with real numbers.

But my art is so far from metrics,

and moreover, my photography is widely exposing the theme of escapism.

My theory is that all of us

struggle sometimes to escape

in order to analyze our reality,

appreciate it or change.

I don't work with daily life as it is,

and I'm not a documentary photographer

in the common sense.

But I am a documentary photographer

in a different sense.

I document dreams.

I work with daily life as it could be,

as I imagine it.

I am a daydreamer, but at the same time I love things that are authentic

and deal with our innermost nature,

which I would never want to escape from.

I adore complicated personalities,

and real life inspires me to create my images.

Real life inspires our escape,

and sometimes that escape is very needed.

I believe heroes are not created easily,

and I choose to work with individuals

who are survivors

and facing everyday routines

that are not always full of color,

people who are on their way to a better life,

fighting against life circumstances.

Why do I choose people like that for my models?

Because I've been in that position myself,

when I had to learn how to survive in real life.

I was a student living abroad in London.

I was working at two places at the same time as a waitress.

Obviously that wasn't my dream job,

but I decided to play a game

where I imagined that I am taking a role in a film,

and in the film I am a waitress,

and I need to act great.

I used to dye my hair and brows to gingerette,

I changed my hair to curly perm,

I lost weight

and made myself believe

I am just a character acting in a film.

That isn't forever,

that is all just temporary.

That helped me a lot.

It motivated me to change my life

and take a hard time as a game.

Now, as an artist,

I am creating different lives for my models

in order to give them the experience of being someone else in reality.

Through the photographic process,

all of my models become like silent movie actors.

They are captured at the moment

when they believe in being someone else entirely.

In order to create a new reality in its entirety,

I physically create every single thing in my work,

sometimes from outfits to the stage.

Because I work with analogues,

and I don't make any digital manipulations to my photographs,

I need everything to take place in reality,

in spite of the fact that nowadays,

digitally, you can create pretty much everything.

I don't like this path.

Even if that reaches perfection,

I see the beauty in authenticity of making,

and that's impossible without flaws.

A digitally manipulated photograph

is not true for me.

It doesn't capture anything real.

It's not experienced, not motivating.

It's like, instead of going traveling,

you look at someone else's travel photographs.

What I find so exciting

is the ability to make people's dreams of being someone else a reality.

That's like a drug

which pushes me to keep working,

even without metrics.

One of my models

had always dreamed of being seen as a warrior,

but she wasn't able to do sports because of her health problems.

Half a year ago, she passed away

from heart disease at the age of 22.

But two days before her death,

the images we spent months working on together

of her as a warrior she dreamed of becoming

were published at a large exhibition in Milan by Vogue Magazine.

All her life was about overcoming.

Before she died, she had known

that thousands of people saw her image from the land of escapism

and believed in her as a brave and fearless warrior.

For my work, I invite people to play a game

like we all used to as children

when we pretend to be someone else

and that process made us really happy.

To my mind it is important for grown-ups.

We need these transformations

to enact this in the name of art.

It gives us the very real feeling of being important and powerful

in order to influence our reality.

I know this from my own personal experience.

I have had so many versions of myself

through my self-portraits

that I've been many different characters.

Being someone else in the land of escapism

doesn't exactly give us numbers that we can gauge,

but it's like a real lost form of magic

which exists but can't be measured.

There is a unique power in art

to transform and lift our limits.

Art creates what I call a conjured life,

which helps our existence

and pushes, motivates and inspires us to dwell

and express ourselves

without metrics or calculations.

Thank you.

(Applause)