Lena Pogrebnaya: Exploring the Youthful Relentlessness Through Photography

The Colorful and Vivid Fashion Editorials

     Since the begging of the 20th century, various photographers were fascinated and inspired by the architecture which provided the perfect playground, definite scenery for their creative visions. Either depicted as backgrounds of mythical and real-life narratives or as dystopian landscapes emptied of humans, the images featuring architectural structures are always complex and fulfilled with a multitude of different layers and tensions.

Although the works of young Ukrainian artist Lena Pogrebnaya can be considered as fashion editorials, those are the images which explore the youthful relentlessness in contrast with stiffness and sovereignty of architecture. The colorful and vivid.

The Thin Line Between Architecture and Photography

Lena Pogrebnaya was born in 1988 in Odessa, Ukraine. She graduated Environmental Design at Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Around 2009 Pogrebnaya started photographing intensely and although self-taught, she quickly managed to establish her own authentic aesthetic which is in great deal inspired by the brutalist architecture of the Soviet era.

Simple geometrical forms are a constitutive element of her practice as they are in nature, so by juxtaposing the human body with certain architectural elements, Pogrebnaya investigates the contradictions of constructed and natural.

The Tales of Youth by Lena Pogrebnaya

It would be expected that this young artist translates the spirit of her own generation, but the images she creates can be easily described as universal and trans-generational. That has to do with the specificity of pictorial language which Pogrebnaya formed quite successfully.

Smooth and vivid color palette, authentic garments, monumental spaces and sensitive, yet authentic models are constitutive elements of each photograph. It seems that the artist is interested in offering a youthful worldview in a cinematic manner, while the prevailing feeling of alienation and contemplation contributes to the impression that Lena Pogrebnaya articulates her own philosophical standpoint in regards to human relations and architecture.