New-York. From Hate to Love

I moved to New York from Moscow 13 years ago. Since then, the relationship between me and this city has been a complicated one. In New York, there’s too much of everything: buildings, cars, people, storefronts, windows, floors, subway lines, the homeless, the wealthy, nationalities, languages, sounds, smells, trash, rats, pigeons.

It’s a city where it’s hard to find solitude, yet loneliness is deeply felt. Life moves at a frantic pace here—people eat, drink, start relationships, and make friends on the go. It feels like you’re always falling behind—behind fashion, schedules, news, the bus, life.

My project is a mix of several media: digital photography, collage, and video. I chose this form of expression because I cannot portray New York as static—it’s always in motion, changing and transforming every second. This city blurs before your eyes and breaks into a million fragments, blinding you with its bright lights and deafening you with ambulance sirens. The visual narrative of the project is composed of my self-portraits interwoven with video sketches of the city.

This work is my attempt to make peace with the city, to find my place in it, to let it pass through me—and perhaps, finally, to love it.