Entry Title: " Cat on a Hot Tin Floor Inside of Her Darkroom"
Name: Yulia Dunaeva, United States
Category: Non-Professional, Self-Portrait


Entry Description: In my opinion, my best work came from the times when I was taking hundreds of pictures of myself, trying to evoke an atmosphere I would create inside of my mind - always spontaneous, rarely well planned. It so happened, I never had a model around to incarnate those ideas, apart from my very self.

The themes I try to convey in my photographs are never about the phantasmagorical higher meanings of life or some other poetical philosophical aspects of the universe, but are very personal, to the point when they become mundane due to the widely relatable nature of those themes. Self perception and self evaluation - something that everybody goes through, most acutely when they are in their teenage years. When I was creating some of my pictures, I was not trying to reach out to a potential viewer to cry for help and attention, but to look inside of me and see if there was anything worth preserving or destroying.

Before moving to the US to attend NYU, I spent 17 years in Moscow, Russia and 2 in Cheltenham, Great Britain (where I finished High School). Throughout my childhood I was surrounded by enormous black bags that my grandfather brought from work. The mysterious bags were full of photographs, a big luxury in what then was the Soviet Union, easily explained by the fact that my grandfather was a photographer in the Diamond Fund of Moscow. I would stare at the portraits of strangers, who would stare right back at me - some with a surprised look on their faces, some with a happy smile, as if they were old friends of mine so very excited to see me. This favourite activity of mine developed somewhat throughout my early teenagehood, when I started discovering different kinds of photography - from Helmut Newton to amateur self-taught photographers like Rosie Hardy and Brooke Shaden, and finally reached its peak when my parents (who saw me play around with grandfather's old polaroid, pinhole and film cameras) got me my first Nikon for my 16th birthday. Soon after realizing that in order to express the images my troubled teenage mind was producing I needed something more than traditional photography, I started learning how to operate the GNU Image Manipulation Program a friend had told me about. Four years of experimenting later I am finally moving into a stage where I draw inspiration from my own mind rather than borrow ideas from people who inspire me.