honorable mention
Mykhaylo Batrak ukraine
Photo © Mykhaylo Batrak
title
Storyteller
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entry description
Idea came with Ukrainian conflict, however time and location here are not important, since all wars have same face...about the photographer
Born in 1984 in Kherson, a provincial town of southern Ukraine. It was time when the Soviet Union era and its values were coming to an end. People from my immediate environment believe I made a right choice entering a nautical college. I carved out a career as a merchant navy officer, won respect and became financially self-sufficient, which was considered a success by common standards. But at a certain point I started to feel there’s something lacking and that my own self was beyond one-size-fits-all concept of modern life. The more I traveled, saw new countries and cities, more books I read, the more apparent the feeling became. In pursuit of answers I turned to photography. I learned everything myself – composition, shooting techniques and best practices. I learned picture editors and developed my own methods and approaches. In 2011, I produced my first decent photo collage. Negation of a conventional reality and meditation enabled me to unite seemingly opposite concepts and ideas in my creative space. So, my photographic experience embodies a synthesis of mind and aesthetics, a fusion of surrealism and Zen Buddhism, logic and sensitivity, European rationality and a cosmic element of the East. My photographs feature much air and sea, play of colors and lines, reflections and transformations. And the most important – they include a spiritual search for the self and the fullness of existence. I’m seeking to expose absolute freedom in my still lifes on glass, zoological metamorphoses, portraits and landscapes. I strain after a photograph to evolve into an open-end story with an ellipsis, from a tool for recording moments of existence. From this standpoint, each piece of my work is a story of searching for freedom and answers for essential questions.back to gallery
