Satellite Voices

Moscow

Lena Vazhenina

April 19, 2011

The rising Moscow photography star talks identity and gender and princesses

• Text by Kemal Tarba

Being on constant look for fresh creative talents Satellite Voices discovered Lena Vazhenina whose works attract by their challenging, sometimes humorous and very often unsettling nature. Lena explores the issues of identity and gender through polymorphous sex creatures that inhabit her photographs. We caught up with young image-maker to understand the ideas lying behind her latest photo-project. 

Satellite Voices: your project is called sexfemale, so what’s with sex? 
Lena Vazhenina: Sex is cool and we all know that. The website is not about sex actually. It's called Sex:female just to catch people's attention in the first place. My other project was called Shitcandy but it was about series of beautiful photos not about shit. 

SV: And what about females? 
Lena Vazhenina:: All girls are princesses. At least we think so. 

SV: Do you consider yourself provocative? 
Lena Vazhenina:: Some find my photos provocative it's true but I just avoid being serious. We all laugh non-stop during shootings and I think my photos are quite funny. 

SV: If you were divine creature, what would you have done the other way?  
Lena Vazhenina: If I was a god I'd made a lot of things work differently. I would revoke the Theory of Relativity in the first place so that we can start traveling to other stars. I would make everyone immortal and even more beautiful than they are now. Like elves.