Q-Art London

It is a truism that medium and message are merging together like never before – a fact worth remembering when trying to grasp the art of Natalia Skobeeva. As a photographer, she has incorporated a wide range of creative processes into her work, and produced some truly unique images. But swimming beneath their surface is something more complex and vigorous; an investigation into the ways photography can become self-reflexive and explore its own possibilities as a medium.

Using vintage cameras, pinhole and Lomo photography – and by printing her work on hand-made paper, silk and metal – Skobeeva’s pictures emphasise immediacy and remind us of the fact that photographs are as much objects as they are images. The artist has consciously set about exploring the chemical fundamentals of photography as a kind of “alchemy”, dealing with the exposure process and, by extension, the nature of light, colour and photosensitive materials; that which defines the work when looking retrospectively.

At present, photography is centred on the camera rather than its raw materials: time, light and chemistry. With the digital revolution, the medium has seen its popularity dramatically increase as cameras become cheaper and people no longer need expert knowledge of the equipment to get a good picture. By contrast, Skobeeva’s photographs, with their analogue identity, eschew the “picture-perfect” attitudes of the digital age, and with this gesture she opts for something more experimental and unpredictable.

Ultimately, her varied output reflects a great curiosity about photography and its reciprocal relationship to visual perception. At the same time, the individual photographs on display in Peculiar Processes attest to a collective desire espoused by many a photographer to re-evaluate the meaning and nature of the medium. Of course, photography can never help but reflect on its own status and condition but it is not by accident that the work of Natalia Skobeeva willfully reject digital manipulation. Instead, her pictures directly engage with a view of photography that equates extending a tradition with its continual questioning. 

Tim Clark is an arts writer who lives between London and Barcelona. He has collaborated with many international photography magazines and works as an art critic at The Barcelona Metropolitan. He is also the founder, editor and director of the online contemporary photography magazine 1000 Words. www.1000wordsmag.com

Written by Tim Clark