Untitled - Work In Progress by Sasha Rudensky (October 25, 2009) 
(5 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)
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Introduction
This week Jörg M Colberg is exploring cultural perspectives by presenting a week of photographers who were born in one country and emigrated to another at some point in their life. Today's presentation: Sasha Rudenksy, who was born in Russia and living in the USA. Colberg: Sasha finds herself in the same situation many of the other emigres in this little Black Snapper series find themselves in: Going back "home" to take photos of the country she was born in. It is up to the reader to try to discern how familiar Sasha really is that country, and this makes for a large part of the appeal of her work.
Next / Chinese Sentiment Is A Personal Journey / Previous / A Contagious Spirit Of Improvisation /
Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
The basis for my work is a desire to negotiate the psychological echoes of a personal history set against a backdrop of political, social, and economic change in the former Soviet Union.
My particular curiosities and ambitions as a photographer are informed by a childhood spent moving between Russia and the US, hyper-aware of the political rhetoric that fed the wild misconceptions of each culture by the other.
My work is driven by the struggle to understand the nature and meaning of “Place”, in its public and private manifestation, as everyday reality and a place imagined, as a space known and knowable, and as one that remains opaque and closed-off.
I photograph to preserve the complexity of the lives I encounter, each subject a version of myself that never left Moscow: a student, a young mother, an aging dissident.
The evidence of these lives embedded in the faces, in the landscapes, and in the interiors form a patchwork of lived and imagined experience.
As a body of work this is a social document and a self-portrait containing all the contradictions, beauty, gravity and humor that has been for me, until now, a “Russia of the mind.”
Sasha Rudensky (1979) lives and works in New York City, USA.
Click weblink sasharudensky.com or browse our archives
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