Anna & Eve, 2005 – 2010

My work as an artist-photographer has always been strongly connected to people. I'm interested in the psychological aspects that we all share and are forced to face simply because we are human beings. Strengths, weaknesses, conflicts, fears, pathologies, unresolved issues of relationships with each other – all these aspects of humanity have been the subject of my visual and conceptual exploration for some time.

Anna & Eve is a narrative project that I started to work on in 2005.  This project (as well as most of my work) dwells in between fantasy and documentary.  Even though, all the scenes are staged, they reveal a real relationship of a mother and her daughter. Anna and Eve were particularly interesting to me, when I first met them in 2005, because the boundary between the child and the adult woman was blurred to an unusually high degree. This was primarily due to the mother's young age (23); it seemed at times that she was more of a child than her 3 year-old daughter. It was often hard to tell who held the power and control between the two, and who was learning the essence of being a human in this world.

I was always interested in folk tales as a representation of common knowledge, and their influence on children’s perception of good and bad, and of morality. Therefore, in the earlier work with Anna and Eve I often applied to my photography a frame of a myth or a folk tale. These photographs are not based on particular tales; rather, they are new myths that represent through phantasmagoric scenes my interpretation of the real relationship of this mother and daughter.

In the more recent works, however, I decided to blur the line between the fantasy and their real life to a much higher extent. The little girl becomes so much more aware of everything that is going on in her life. She makes her first steps into adulthood, but at the same time she is still a child who lives in her own world.