Shot Magazine 14 | Interview with Anastasiia Koval

Born in Ukraine, Koval embraced a career as a model at a very young age before moving to New York City. Surrounded by the style and personalities of her fellow models, Koval began to photograph them as they were drinking wine, smoking cigarettes or choosing their outfits. In this way, her passion for photography naturally emerged as she began capturing stolen moments and natural settings, allowing her to express herself through this creative practice. This is how her art project began, As I See You by Koval.

Anastasiia Koval Shot Magazine Interview Issue 14

Koval, what is beauty to you?

Beauty to me is not about appearance or good genetics. It is about personality: I love strong independent women who can always protect themselves and, at the same time, be both so feminine and masculine. Beauty is within the eyes, whether it is vulnerable, strong or seductive.

How did your journey as a photographer begin?

I had a passion for photography since I was little. I bought my first digital camera when I was 14 and started to shoot my little sister and classmates in school. At 16, I was scouted as a model and travelled to Tokyo. I stopped taking pictures because I saw the level of other photographers and felt too distant from them. In 2017 I lived in model apartments in Milan. Every night some of my roommate models came back from work, they were so beautiful, their hair and makeup was well done, and while we all had dinner and sometimes a glass of wine, I took pictures of them on my phone just as I saw them. After a while, I decided to start my own project, As I See You.

What inspires you most, at first sight?

People. When living in New York, everything around looks like a movie and every stranger becomes an actor: I like to watch them. And of course, females. Females inspire me the most.

What are the greatest challenges you’ve found as a creative in NYC?

The greatest challenge for me in New York is to find my other side of creativity, that is acting and photography. It’s something that I have always wanted to do but there was never a moment to do so. New York is the city where dreams come true, but you have to really dream and work hard and believe in yourself. I love challenges.

When do you feel most free?

Under the rain. I’m in love with the rain, I feel so vulnerable and so happy. As someone said, “Don’t say that you love rain if you open umbrella”.

What is the role of femininity in your works?

I think all my work is protecting me at the moment. Masculinity was in my blood at all times. Since I was kid, I used to fight and challenge myself. I never saw differences between women and men. Perhaps, when I saw a strong, fast person, I challenged myself to be like them or better. Femininity came later. I always liked to watch classic movies and copied the behaviour of ladies that I liked. So, I learned it first and then poured it into my work as a photographer.

What is womanhood, to you?

You can be a boxer, fighter, racer, and at the same time such a feminine woman. Womanhood comes with the way you talk, the way you hold yourself, with posture and movement, I think it is such a natural thing. You can be a bad ass girl when you feel like it, and then wear a classic dress or heels, and kill them with your feminine side.

More interesting

Hanan Roz

With the delicate and elegant silhouettes of these bodies, fluctuating as ghosts in cages of wire mesh, the expectations that are constantly put on women’s bodies are challenged in a radical yet subtle manner. Hanan Roz, the Lebanese artist and creator of this collection of sculptures, here explores the hidden dichotomies of toughness and fragility, beauty and pain, expectations and reality, both in their material and symbolic forms. By incorporating her personal experience as a woman into the process of creating these delicate yet arduous bodies, she explores the meaning of femininity and beauty, thus offering the viewer a sense of this journey. Hands are reaching out from skins made of wire, whilst headless and limbless bodies sensually dance within their invisible nets. Each sculpture incarnates a diverse expression of the feminine body, shedding light on its metaphysical structures, its innate diversity, its beautiful strength.

Cristina Mittermeier

The dusky pink trio of feeding flamingos, the ethereal vision of a lonely humpback whale or the current of a colourful shoal of fish are only some of the rich collection of photographs that Cristina “Mitty” Mittermeier has caught and brought back to land from the depths of the natural world. With her talent and profound ecological sensibility, Cristina has become one of the leading nature photographer of our day and has co-founded SeaLegacy, a global agency for the ocean aiming to bring together climate action and sustainable solutions by supporting scientific endeavours and conservation strategies. In her explorations of both the natural and human realms, Cristina attempts to bridge these worlds through her photography, in an attempt to instil awe and convey the beauty of ecologies that are often distant and unseen. In this interview, she tells us about how her relationship to the natural environment has developed, how her journey as a woman has affected her works, and how we must understand how much is enough in order to find harmony with our wounded and depleted earth. It all starts with a sense of enough.

Maïmouna Guerresi

In her works, the Italian-Senegalese artist Maïmouna Guerresi portrays the sacred nature of humanity by merging influences from her own personal ancestry and a plurality of cultures. Particularly inspired by Islam and Sufi mysticism, Maïmouna draws from these philosophies to represent messages that are universal in nature, as they appeal to human spirituality devoid of any particular localism, through bare backgrounds, giant figures and plain robes. With simple beauty, she delves into the realm of religion and mystique accompanied by an elegant and graceful language which she developed throughout her artistic development in the Veneto region of Italy. In her works, Maïmouna elevates the human condition to one of spiritual being, of symbolic meaning, of profound understanding.

Sepideh Salehi

As a brave, bold and elegant artist, Sepideh Salehi has been merging various visual languages and processes to explore the notions of home, family and cultural history. Born in Teheran, Iran, Sepideh’s artwork is profoundly soaked in her experience as a young Iranian woman during the authoritarian regime of the Islamic state, which has institutionalised the segregation of women and men, to this day, in what is now known as gender apartheid. The concepts of covering up, hiding and privacy have thus underpinned the layers of collage, photography, painting, printmaking, calligraphy that the artist has combined to explore the relationship between the inner and outer vision of female identity. As well as this, Sepideh is interested in exploring how one’s environment, memories, belonging may be intertwined with their personal narratives to reimagine realities and propose new visions. In the obscured faces of her photographic collages, such as the iconic Mohr Portrait, the connection between identity, landscape and unknown is dissected and reconfigured to understand how women are wrongly perceived in their society and to question how the female self-perception is conditioned by its environment. As a sign of protest, her faces are covered, unrevealed, obscured from the viewer to allow for their identity to mature in secret. For this reason, Sepideh merges post-1979 Teheran cultural history with elements of her own past, in order to depict the struggles of female oppression against the injustice of abusive political regime, and to bring together a new, unknown gaze beneath the layers of one’s identity.

Aleah Chapin

Aleah Chapin is a visual artist from Seattle, USA, who has been painting human bodies to question, reconsider, reimagine and subvert their traditional role in western culture. Female bodies in particular are portrayed as they are dancing, laughing, interfolding, embracing each other, to explore the notions of aging, gender and beauty as we see them genuinely unfold before our eye, balanced within a misty landscape, against the backdrop of a forest or amongst dragonflies. Aleah’s early paintings depict natural bodies that recount their own stories, that become expressions of the forces of life, as opposed to the values through which we are taught to understand them in our contemporary society. Her most recent works stand in stark contrast with the immaculate realism of the previous, representing a radical shift inwards to a more abstract, emotional, psychological dimension. This conceptual understanding of living within a body, of finding a way home to ourselves, was prompted by the turbulent times that have shaken our world in the last years, thus leading the artist to seek for greater meaning in a visual language that relies on colours, shapes and feelings, putting forth a more comprehensive and universal message. Nonetheless, throughout her works, Aleah Chapin consistently invites new conversations on the same question: what does it mean to exist within a body today?

Odile Decq

By taking the discipline of architecture to its creative extremes, Odile Decq is renowned for her whimsical and cutting-edge projects that attempt to reimagine space and what is possible to create within this. As an architect, urban planner and academic, Odile Decq merges her bold creative language with the surrounding environment to create buildings that radically reconceptualise the relationships between human life and space. Particularly in the male dominated field of architecture, she has broken boundaries both due to her creative intuition and her struggle as a woman in this environment, thus proving to the younger generation that daring to dream is, indeed, the only way to change reality for the better. In this interview, we have the pleasure of speaking to the founder of Studio Odile Decq.

Kimiko Yoshida

Hiding beneath masks of identity, searching for absence, circulating in the layers of time, culture, custom: Kimiko Yoshida explores the nature of being oneself, whilst letting go of all that is attached to this notion. By covering her gaze with drapes, masks or emblems, she becomes one with her background and the elements adorning her being, thus learning to question what it means to be an individual, to dress oneself with an identity. Her self-portraits serve to present a collection of photographs where the environment and subject are always the same, yet constantly portray something alien to itself. There is in fact a gap between the representation and signification of these images, where identity is captured as a static object that is able to transform, deflect, convert or recast itself in various ways, to the point of becoming no longer recognisable. Born in Tokyo, Kimiko was formed in Japan until 1995, when she decided to keep pursuing her academic career as artist and photographer in Paris. Through her examination of identity and her depictions of its illusion, Kimiko is able to raise essential questions around the female identity and, in the words of Rimbaud, “find strange, unfathomable, repugnant, delicious things”. Indeed by letting go of the dominance of our ego, we will take these things in, we will understand.

SHOT | Article Anastasiia Koval

Anastasiia Koval

As I See You