Photo © Jenia Fridlyand
Talent of the Year 2020 - NOMINEE: Jenia Fridlyand
the leaves will fall from the sky
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I travelled to Cuba for the first time in 2012 on an assignment, and, aside from being infatuated with the beauty of this place and the character of its people, I experienced an uncanny sense of recognition. While it was evident to me that this familiarity came from my having grown up in the Soviet Union, everything looked, smelled, and felt too differently from the memories of my childhood, and the few vestiges of communist architecture couldn’t account for the intensity of that sensation. The conundrum planted a seed that germinated 5 years later: in 2017 I began traveling to Cuba regularly to photograph.
In the intervening years, I began and completed my first major body of work, “Entrance to our Valley” In the process, I established the view camera and black and white film as my essential tools for probing the questions that rivet me, and this was what I took on the road with me in Cuba. In the eight trips over a two year period, I was able to travel the entire island, climb its highest peak, and return to places that fascinated me most.
The title of this project comes from the saying “El que nace para tamal del cielo le caen las hojas”, which expresses a deference to destiny deeply endemic to both Cuban and Russian cultures. This fatalism, I came to believe, is bred in large part by having to survive in an inherently unpredictable system. Anchoring myself in the familiarity of that circumstance, I am using my photographs to intuit some of the ways in which Cuban relationship to fate is different from the one I know.
About author:
Jenia Fridlyand (Moscow, 1975) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The self-published edition of Fridlyand’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and a trade edition (TIS Books) is in production.
Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads Collective, a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring together artists, educators, and bookmakers in communities around the world for a mutual exchange of ideas and experiences related to the photobook.
Fridlyand studied photography at Centre Iris and Université Paris VIII, and holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.
In the intervening years, I began and completed my first major body of work, “Entrance to our Valley” In the process, I established the view camera and black and white film as my essential tools for probing the questions that rivet me, and this was what I took on the road with me in Cuba. In the eight trips over a two year period, I was able to travel the entire island, climb its highest peak, and return to places that fascinated me most.
The title of this project comes from the saying “El que nace para tamal del cielo le caen las hojas”, which expresses a deference to destiny deeply endemic to both Cuban and Russian cultures. This fatalism, I came to believe, is bred in large part by having to survive in an inherently unpredictable system. Anchoring myself in the familiarity of that circumstance, I am using my photographs to intuit some of the ways in which Cuban relationship to fate is different from the one I know.
About author:
Jenia Fridlyand (Moscow, 1975) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The self-published edition of Fridlyand’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and a trade edition (TIS Books) is in production.
Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads Collective, a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring together artists, educators, and bookmakers in communities around the world for a mutual exchange of ideas and experiences related to the photobook.
Fridlyand studied photography at Centre Iris and Université Paris VIII, and holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.