Elizaveta Porodina: “Loneliness Catapulted Me Into Art Making”

With the release of Found Dreams, photographer Elizaveta Porodina looks back on the strange path that took her from clinical psychology to fashion

Speaking with photographer Elizaveta Porodina on a grainy Zoom call, as she logs on from New York, it quickly becomes clear that this interview will break with formalities. Porodina has a casual, conversational manner that invites candour. “I’m sitting in my favourite place in the world,” she tells me. She’s referring to Elizabeth Street Garden, a pocket of nature in the heart of Manhattan. The Munich-based photographer is in New York for a week of appearances and the release of her debut photo book, Found Dreams, published by Prestel, which compiles her favourite works from her career to date.

Renowned for her surreal, painterly and psychologically intense images that push fashion photography into the realm of fine art, Porodina has established herself as one of the most sought-after photographers of her generation. She has attracted clients such as Dior, Hermès and Armani, while her subjects have ranged from Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Zendaya to Brad Pitt and Ariana Grande. An autodidact who previously worked as a clinical psychologist, her route into the echelons of art and fashion wasn’t exactly conventional. 

Born and raised in Russia until the age of 12, Porodina later moved to Germany, where she experienced the alienation of being a foreigner. “I lost any type of connection to people,” she recalls. “When I came to Germany, I didn’t have the language or social skills. I felt very alone. But that loneliness catapulted me into art making.” Art became a kind of refuge – a place to escape her surroundings. “Since being a little girl, art has been my love language and is the air that I breathe. It’s the language I spoke when I was at my lowest, and it’s the language I speak when I’m at my highest,” she tells AnOther.

Coming from an academic family who discouraged her artistic ambitions, Porodina trained in psychology, largely out of a sense of obligation to do something “safe”. In 2009, however, she abandoned psychology and began taking photographs at weekends, teaching herself everything she knows. She doesn’t regard those years as wasted time: psychology remains deeply embedded in her practice, particularly her interest in vulnerability, behaviour and human connection. “I have solidified certain concepts that I was already thinking about before I studied psychology – from understanding life and trying to figure out myself, other people and human behaviour,” she explains. Photography became another way of accessing people. “The camera gave me permission to connect with others. It was a facilitatory tactic.”

Porodina’s decision to remain self-taught was equally important. “I didn’t want intervention from a teacher who would tell me things like you have to centre the picture, or you cannot underexpose or overexpose,” she says. “I felt quite protective of my work. Those rules felt rigid, and at the end of the day, who cares?” Her fantastical, ethereal visual language emerged from this willingness to disregard convention and follow her instinct. Looking back at her early career, she says with humorous self-deprecation: “I’m still not sure where this young woman found the courage and delusion to quit psychology and become a photographer.”

That instinctive approach is encapsulated in the title of her new book, Found Dreams – a paradoxical phrase (we cannot necessarily find dreams, they simply arrive in our unconscious state). But for Porodina, creativity is less an act of contrived invention than excavation from the mind. She describes the most rewarding moments as those in which she sees something internally before finding a physical form for it: “You just have to drop that invisible thing that you’re already seeing into physical form, so everyone else can see it too,” she explains. 

Found Dreams reflects not only Porodina’s fascination with the unconscious, but the idea of leaning into something more intuitive. It also gestures towards the surrealists, whose attempts to access the subconscious – through dreams, hypnosis and automatic writing – sought to bypass conscious control in the pursuit of creative discovery. Porodina’s own process begins similarly with imagination. “I always write a story at the beginning of a new project,” she explains. “The story is very solid – it could stand on its own feet.”

“Every single story that I tell is about transformation,” she explains. Take, for example, the image featuring the chameleonic actress Jessie Buckley. We see her holding a needle and thread, as if in the act of refabricating or resewing herself. For Porodina, this mirrors her own experiences of transition and self-discovery. “I have been changing very fast, very much throughout my life, and it has been very confusing at times to be in transit, quite literally and metaphorically.”

To understand Porodina’s work is to comprehend that her images are saturated with her own psyche and life experiences, the personal struggles, and her desire to connect meaningfully with others. But her work also offers rich art historical references: the work of the Surrealists, the colourful stagings photographic pioneers such as Madame Yevonde, or the suspenseful films of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. An array of sources propose an alternative reality, in which her figures appear uninhibited by the presence of the camera. Her subjects appear suspended between fantasy and reality – occupying dreamlike, liminal spaces that imply transition or fleeting states. 

However, at the heart of it all is something more human – more primordial. “Love is the motivation behind my work,” she admits, laughing as she jokes that she’s giving herself an ick by that confession. “It’s about the many guises love can take. Love can have many different costumes throughout life. It can sometimes look terrifying, like it’s clawing your heart out. Other times it can feel quite stable and safe – like you just found a safe haven.”

Elizaveta Porodina: Found Dreams is published by Prestel Publishing and out now