Photographer Yulia Artemyeva from Nizhny Novgorod created these beautiful photos "Ballerina and Flowers" to capture the moment when a ballerina's gesture is as graceful and beautiful as a flower. “The duration of the ballerina’s career is short, as is the life of the flower. Do you know at what age ballerinas retire in Russia? 38 years! A woman’s natural beauty is also not eternal, much like the life of a flower. There are many allegories here. This is a constant comparison. There is the fragility of a flower, of beauty, of a ballet dance career, and of a graceful ballerina,” she explains.
The photo series consists of just 13 black and white images, but all of them carry a strong visual message and make us stop and stare at the details and similarities between them. “At first, the project consisted of 9 photos, and I decided to add 4 photos a year later. As a result, 13 photos were added to the exhibition of this photo project,” says the photographer. Each pair of photos compares an image of a flower's shape and a ballerina's gesture replicating it. “Ballet is a huge part of my life. I have been dancing ballet all throughout my childhood and youth. With this creative idea, I lived this part of my life anew. This photo project is therapy for me, it closed the Gestalt. So the inspiration came from the memories of the past.”
“This project has been living for 4 years. I shot it in my hometown Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. The heroine was a ballerina of the Opera and Ballet Theatre.” The photographer picked the model Marina Mastyka to show the extraordinary beauty of a ballerina. “When I saw Marina for the first time, I immediately realized that she should be the heroine of this project! She was small, fragile, thin... only this ballerina may be compared to a fragile flower!” she explains. Her airy ballerina dresses wonderfully resemble flower petals and her mesmerizing movements depict the actual form of flowers. Marina Mastyka's arms are soft and rounded and you can see a forward tilt in the upper body, giving the flowery, willowy look.
Comparing women to flowers is a quite common motif in European and Asian cultures. This traditional motif can be found in poems, books, photography, and other art spheres. Even the famous writer William Shakespeare, who lived in the last part of the 16th and the early 17th century, found similarities between women and flowers, especially comparing the fragility of their sexuality (not to mention that Shakespeare even had a female character named Viola!)
