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Olga Kotilevskaia

Aug 27

Why Mythology Still Matters in Contemporary Visual Arts

By Education, News No Comments

Photography is often associated with documenting reality, but some of the most compelling images do something very different: they transform reality into something symbolic. This is one reason mythology continues to matter to contemporary photographers (and filmmakers, as can be seen in Christopher Nolan’s recent film The Odyssey). Myths give artists a visual language for experiences that are difficult to represent directly: love, desire, grief, sacrifice, transformation, motherhood, violence, death, and rebirth.

Myth as a Visual Language

Mythology does not have to mean photographing Greek gods or recreating biblical scenes. At its most useful, mythology provides a framework through which a photographer can approach an idea.

A photograph of a person standing beside a doorway can simply be a portrait. But the doorway might also suggest transition. Water, one of the omnipresent Tarkovskian motives, can become more than a landscape: it can represent purification, danger, rebirth or loss. A mirror can suggest vanity, self-knowledge or fragmentation. The power lies in the associations we already carry with these images.

Why Use Ancient Stories Today?

According to Carl Jung, myths survive because they are the natural, external language of the collective unconscious, rooted in inherited psychological patterns called archetypes. They also survive because their central questions are remarkably persistent: human beings still fall in love, lose people, leave home, become parents, experience violence, seek redemption, and confront mortality. The context changes, but the emotional territory remains.

This allows contemporary photographers to place very personal experiences within something larger. Instead of making an image that simply says this happened to me, mythology can allow an artist to ask: what does this experience mean beyond me?

That shift can be particularly powerful in portraiture and fine-art photography. A subject does not have to represent only themselves; they can become a character within a larger visual narrative.

You Don’t Need to Photograph a Myth

Perhaps the most interesting way to work with mythology is indirectly. You don’t need to photograph Orpheus to make a photograph about grief. You don’t need to recreate the Crucifixion to explore sacrifice. You don’t need to stage the story of Narcissus to make an image about self-obsession.

Instead, think about the emotional structure of the story. What is the conflict? What changes? What is lost? What cannot be recovered? Once you understand that structure, you can translate it into your own visual language.

This might mean using lighting to create a sense of temptation or isolation, composition to suggest entrapment, or repetition to evoke cycles of loss and renewal. The mythology becomes invisible beneath the photograph, but its structure remains.

From Personal Story to Universal Image

The best use of mythology is not decoration but transformation. A photographer might begin with something deeply personal—an ending relationship, becoming a parent, leaving a country, grieving someone, or simply confronting a changing sense of identity. Mythological thinking can provide a way of moving from the individual experience towards something more universal.

This is particularly relevant to contemporary photography, where the boundary between autobiography and constructed image has become increasingly fluid. Artists can draw on centuries of visual history to tell stories that could not have existed in any previous era.

The result doesn’t have to look ancient. It can be strange, contemporary, glamorous, minimal, surreal, or completely ordinary. What matters is that beneath the photograph there is another story waiting to be discovered.

Perhaps that is why mythology remains so useful to photographers: it reminds us that an image does not have to explain everything. Sometimes its greatest power comes from making us recognise something we cannot quite name.

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Aug 26

Anna Kiparis: “For Me, Love and Death Are Almost the Same Thing.”

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by Victor von Krasowski

For the London-based artist Anna Kiparis, biblical stories are not simply sacred texts, but a vast archive of human experience — one through which she examines love, motherhood, war, loss, femininity, and transformation. Her work moves between the personal and the universal, bringing together religious imagery, the female body, animals, stone, and the visual language of the Baroque to explore experiences that are difficult to contain in words.

We spoke with Anna about the Bible as a source of human knowledge, her fascination with the Baroque, and her search for ways to speak about death without making it beautiful.

Your work often explores powerful symbols connected to femininity, spirituality, and identity. How did these themes begin to appear in your practice?

Turning to the Bible as a primary source of human experience rather than simply as a sacred text, I developed a kind of bibliomancy: I began opening it at random and reading from wherever the page fell. Each project grows out of a discovery and the coincidence between that discovery and the way I experience what is happening in the world and in my own life.

My first conscious engagement with religious texts came shortly before the war began, and I am still searching for an answer to the question of what we are failing to understand: what makes us continue to kill one another. My goal is not a path towards faith, but a search for ways to teach the mind to survive without simply shutting out the news. I want to speak up about what is happening. I want to speak about it with other people, to make feelings visible, and to advocate for creation as an alternative to destruction.

 

 

Your recent work draws from very personal experiences. How do you decide what parts of your personal story become part of your artistic language?

The experience that makes us human and, in my case, the experience that makes me an artist is not simply the discovery of emotions, but the exploration of their complete cycle: their birth, their existence, and their death. In my latest project, A Time to Cast Away Stones, I propose examining familiar stories in their entirety, as complete cycles. For example, the story of the Great Flood unfolds across three scenes in this series: Noah’s encounter with God, forty days and forty nights of rain, and God’s covenant with the earth, witnessed by the eight survivors as they see the rainbow above the water.

The Flood
Oil on lazuli
15 × 23 cm
The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them
Genesis 6:13

The personal reason I became interested in this circular structure of catastrophe came from my own observations about love and death. For me, in terms of how they are structured, love and death are almost the same thing. Since 2020, many of those reading this have experienced several kinds of death: war, emigration, separation from loved ones, and the loss of the life they once knew. In my case, all of this happened alongside motherhood, which seemed destined to become the thing that would defeat death, because it is ultimately a joyful experience, filled with love. Yet I discovered that within tragedy, love can become distorted; it can lose both its beauty and its sense of belonging.

There is something about the way a young mother experiences the death of her former life — the life that existed before motherhood, when she loses her connection with the world in exchange for the privilege of giving life to someone else — in which love begins to feel like death. The unconditional nature of maternal love is as absolute as the fact of disappearance. It is an incredibly radical and uncompromising story, without half-tones or shades of grey, without instructions for survival — only the heart’s command to love or die.

Many people experience tension between social expectations and their own sense of identity. Has your artistic practice helped you understand or redefine yourself beyond the roles traditionally expected of women?

My work with femininity and sensuality is deliberately abstract and, contrary to the more familiar tendency among women artists to speak from a personal perspective, I try to investigate those experiences without speaking exclusively in the first person. My art similarly proposes looking at the world not from the perspective of a human being, but from that of a cow—a living, feeling creature which, returning to your question, has an analogy with motherhood and femininity.

My use of personal experience again comes back to the relationship between love and death. I am still living through this experience and learning how to live with it. I could divide my exploration into several chapters. The first ended with motherhood; the second is happening now, as I choose to move forward alone.

The project about the Madonna and the Whore marked this second transition. For twenty years I was a wife and a mother, an orthodox devotee, a Madonna, a sacred cow, if you like. Now I don’t want to take on roles; I want, on the contrary, to free myself from the possibility of being assigned any role at all. This is undoubtedly a challenge to myself, and I am very proud of myself for having the courage to accept this decision as the only right one.

Your work brings together religious references, biblical imagery, and representations of the female body. What interests you about the meeting point between the sacred and the sensual?

After a year of experimentation, I am returning to a direction that demands a high level of concentration and technical mastery — to where I began, when I first started painting scenes with cows onto stone. I love that this work allows me to draw on my skills in academic painting and traditional composition. I am proud to have developed those skills, and to have the opportunity to keep refining them.

When I paint, I become completely liberated. I stop being the person I am, more or less, for the rest of the time. You could say that when I paint, I feel happy. Like a blessed person who sees images of Christ everywhere, I see scenes in the patterns of a cut stone. I work with its palette and landscape as though they were traces of an ancient event, and I feel a kind of responsibility towards the stone—to have earned the right to tell its story anew.

I learned a great deal from my longtime friend Masha Burganova-Yaltanskaya, who graduated from school with the highest marks in physics and mathematics in all of Moscow, but chose to become an icon painter. She revealed many extraordinary secrets to me, including how almost anything can be created from just four colours: burnt ochre, ochre, black, and white. Yes, even blue, yellow, pink, and lilac.

As for subject matter, I combine personal experience with what troubles the people close to me. When we become desperate to believe and wait for the war to end, for love to become mutual, for our children to grow up, and for us finally to become a little happier, we want to find somewhere to direct our creative energy. We want to stop reading our own lives as unique phenomena and instead understand them as part of a broader human experience. After all, we all experience more or less the same things, and all that remains is to feel something and perhaps understand something. I think that is what the Bible is for, and what makes it useful today.

Red Skies
Rhodonite, oil and gold
20 x 18 cm
You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times
Matthew 16:3

After such a transformative period in your life, what questions are you interested in exploring next through your work?

It is not so much about what comes next as about my desire to continue working with the Baroque. I don’t know what fascinates me more about it in the conventional sense: its attempt to make beauty more complex, or the philosophical concepts that allow us to understand the Baroque as a way of perceiving the world.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold, developed in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, I imagine Baroque drapery in which each fold, as it changes, causes the entire fabric to shift. There is something beautiful about this complexity and about the particular interconnectedness of events. For me, it corresponds very closely to the way I understand the world: events, relationships with other people, the workings of our emotions — everything is connected, both internally and to everything around it.

Surprisingly, the concept also has a strong relationship with science. Remember those demonstrations of how gravity works, where a piece of fabric is stretched out, and objects of different sizes and weights are placed on it? The fabric responds differently to each one. It is almost like Baroque drapery, demonstrating different densities — in other words, the different weight or significance of an event.

 

It is important for me to preserve beauty in my work, and to communicate the pleasure I experience while creating it. The most difficult question that the Baroque poses — and that I am posing to myself in my future work — is how to work with death. Baroque art often poeticises death, making it beautiful by placing dead bodies alongside the living and playing with subtle variations of colour and tone; it can even place martyrdom alongside vanity. I am searching for ways to speak about death without beautifying it. I believe that will be my main task over the coming year.

 

How to find Anna:
https://www.instagram.com/kiparis_ann/

https://annakiparis.co.uk/

Interested in being interviewed for our blog or know someone who would like to be featured? Please reach out to us directly to explore any possibilities:

[email protected]

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Jul 22

Why Cyanotype Still Matters in Contemporary Photography

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In a world where photographs can be captured, edited, and shared in seconds, cyanotype offers a radically different way of thinking about image-making.

Developed in 1842 by the English scientist Sir John Herschel, cyanotype is one of the earliest photographic printing processes. Using a light-sensitive solution and ultraviolet light, it produces its unmistakable deep Prussian blue prints. While its history is fascinating, its growing popularity among contemporary artists has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with the creative possibilities the process offers today.

Unlike digital photography, cyanotype cannot be rushed. Every stage, from coating the paper and preparing negatives to exposing, washing, and drying the print, requires time, patience, and a willingness to embrace unpredictability. Small variations in sunlight, exposure, humidity, and chemistry mean that no two prints are ever exactly alike.

For many artists, this slower pace is precisely the point. Cyanotype encourages a more deliberate relationship with photography, shifting the focus away from instant results and towards experimentation, materiality, and process. The photograph becomes not just an image but a physical object shaped by light, time, and touch.

Whether you’re an analogue enthusiast or primarily work digitally, exploring historic photographic processes can deepen your understanding of the medium itself. Sometimes, looking back is one of the best ways to move your practice forward.

Curious how contemporary artists are reimagining this 19th-century process? Read our conversation with Fergus Carmichael Winterbon here.

Cyanotype reminds us that photography begins with light. While few photographers work with nineteenth-century printing processes every day, the same principles remain at the heart of every great image.

Whether you’re creating portraits, editorial work, or developing a personal project, our studio offers a space to slow down, explore new ideas, and discover what light can do when it’s given room to shape the photograph.

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Artwork by Fergus Carmichael Winterbon

Jul 22

Fergus Carmichael Winterbon: Against the Speed of Modern Photography

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Recently, we sat down with Fergus Carmichael Winterbon, a photographic artist whose practice centres on the historic cyanotype process. In a photographic culture driven by speed and instant results, Fergus has chosen a life organised around slowness and resistance to the pace of modern image-making. Through patience and an appreciation for analogue processes, his work reminds us that some photographs are not simply captured but are carefully cultivated over time.

 

What experience first made you realise you were an artist?

It might have been my first experience of watching Magenta Devine on TV as a child in the ’90s. I often think back to seeing a French band performing in a see-through cement mixer and
feeling my mind completely open up.
But let me bring it back to photography. In my late teens, I started photographing anything and everything. I started out on film, back when you could buy it cheaply and get it developed almost anywhere. There was something about seeing a photograph in print capturing the feeling or emotion of a scene, landscape, or person that totally captivated me. I don’t think I’ve stopped taking photographs since I was 16 or 17.
When it comes to photography and artists, I think the first exhibition that really affected me was Diane Arbus. It was possibly the first time I cried in a gallery. The first photobook I bought was Truth Study Center… probably because there was cock in it, but Tillmans shaped how I looked and made photographs in my life for a good decade.
All of these moments link back to me discovering myself as an artist. I’ve known for a long time that this is what I wanted to do, but over the last four years there has been a real shift in both my mindset and my practice.
Alongside his photographic practice, Fergus works as the General Manager of an independent group of coffee shops in London’s Fleet Street. Balancing a full-time career with artistic work has shaped the rhythm of his creative process, encouraging him to embrace photography as something that unfolds over days rather than hours. A single cyanotype can involve preparing materials one day, exposing and washing the print the next, before allowing it to dry and deciding whether to tone it, often using coffee, which subtly transforms the characteristic Prussian blue into warmer, more organic hues. Fergus continues to push the process further, experimenting with large-scale cyanotypes while remaining committed to the slow, tactile qualities that first drew him to this remarkable nineteenth-century technique.

What do you struggle with the most in your creative work, and how do you confront it?

Time. Money. Self-doubt. Wondering if the work is good enough. Technical challenges. Having enough space to make large-scale pieces. The way I deal with it is pretty simple; I just keep going. I keep making, keep shooting, keep learning, and keep developing my processes. There is always something new to learn, and on both the good days and the bad days, I have to keep creating. The larger-scale works are coming over the next two or three months once I’ve reprocessed all of my acetate negatives.

Which ideas, people, or works have most influenced the way you think?

The list is endless. Four or five years ago, I would probably have said Wolfgang Tillmans and Diane Arbus. Now it’s artists like Ana Mendieta, Laura Aguilar, and Mark McKnight, alongside ideas around queer ecology. More than ever, though, painting has taken over as my influence. Doron Langberg and Daniel Crews-Chubb completely blow my mind.
I have a lot of thanks to the team at BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! Paul McDonald and Ghislain Pascal re-shaped my practice and thinking back in 2022 after becoming stagnant with where I was at for a long time. And a lot comes from the MA programme I’ve just completed. The teaching and the range of artists and ideas I was exposed to at London College of Communication really changed the way I think about making work as an extension of photography.

If you could change one thing about how people experience your work, what would it be?

At a solo exhibition at MoMA. I have big goals, and that’s one of them. More realistically, I’d love for more people to experience the work in person. My current practice doesn’t fully translate on a screen. The materials, scale, and physical presence are all part of the work, and that’s something you can only really appreciate when you’re standing in front of it.

How to find Fergus:
https://www.instagram.com/fergus_carmichael_winterbon/

https://ferguscarmichaelwinterbon.com/

 

 

Interested in being interviewed for our blog or know someone who would like to be featured? Please reach out to us directly to explore any possibilities:
[email protected]

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Jun 26

Why Black & White Still Matters in Photography

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Why Black & White Still Matters in Photography

Black and white photography is often treated as an aesthetic decision. In practice, it is closer to a constraint. They say, limitation is the mother of invention — and it’s true for constraints, which tend to sharpen perception rather than limit it.

When colour is removed, the image is forced to rely on more fundamental visual elements: tonal range, contrast, texture, and spatial relationships. What remains is that there is less mediation between subject and viewer. Everything becomes structural.

Black and white also carries philosophical weight. Think of the way existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir described confronting reality without illusions. Stripped of colour, a portrait can feel similarly honest, presenting the subject — and ourselves as observers — without compromise.

Seeing Without Colour Changes How You Think

Shooting in black and white is not the same as converting afterwards. Conversion is a translation; seeing in monochrome is a different language altogether.

When you stop relying on colour cues, your attention shifts elsewhere:

  • Skin is no longer “warm” or “cool” — it becomes dense and reflective
  • Backgrounds stop competing through hue and instead either recede or assert themselves through value
  • Light stops being descriptive and becomes architectural

You begin to notice whether a frame actually holds together, not because it is pleasing, but because it is structurally coherent.

The Role of Light Becomes Absolute

In monochrome work, light is no longer an enhancer but the subject’s co-author. A soft shift in exposure can flatten a face that felt dimensional in colour. A hard edge of light can turn an ordinary wall into a graphic plane. Without colour to carry interest, light has to do the entire job of separation, emphasis, and mood.

This is why black and white photography often feels more “serious” or distilled — not because it is inherently deeper, but because it removes redundancy.

What Changes Practically in the Studio

Once you commit to monochrome during the shoot (not after), the technical decisions become more immediate. You start to notice:

  • Whether the subject actually separates from the background without colour helping you
  • Whether shadows are too soft to define form, or too hard to preserve detail
  • Whether texture is doing any real compositional work, or just sitting there as surface noise

It becomes much harder to “save” an image later. The decisions have to be made in real time.

Studio Tip: Work as If Colour Does Not Exist

  • Try building a setup where colour is irrelevant from the very beginning
  • Shoot tethered in black and white if possible, or mentally commit to ignoring hue entirely
  • Light for shape, not mood
  • Position for structure, not balance
  • Look for tension between surfaces rather than harmony between tones
  • Then step back and ask a simple question: does this image still hold if everything decorative is removed?

If the answer is yes, you are not just making a black and white photograph but working with form at its most exposed level.

Book Studio Time and Shoot in Black & White

Our studio is built for image-making that relies on structure rather than surface. Whether you’re developing portrait work, fashion editorials, or more stripped-back experiments, this is the space to test how far you can push form when nothing decorative is left to rely on.

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Jun 20

Katya Zhingel: “I find beauty in things that are strange or unsettling.”

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Katya Zhingel is a conceptual artist whose practice explores how mental states such as anxiety and depression reshape personality and perception. Her recent work focuses on making anxiety visible and tangible by externalising it as surreal. Katya investigates the paradox of fear as something we both resist and seek out, transforming personal experiences of anxiety into something that can be observed, confronted, and managed.

 

What experience first made you realise you were an artist?

I first realised I was an artist when I began creating conceptual photography projects as a way to cope with depression. Art became a tool for reflecting on my emotional state and responding to the world around me.

For nearly fifteen years, photography was my primary medium. More recently, I have started experimenting with video, digital art, installation, and 3D sculpture, expanding the ways I can tell stories and explore ideas.

What does a typical day look like for you – in work and in life?

I work on new projects from my apartment, so my schedule is quite flexible. I enjoy working in the mornings—searching for references, finding models when needed, sketching ideas for future photographs and drawings, and listening to music for inspiration.

When I finish working, I leave the piece somewhere visible and return to it throughout the day. Looking at it with fresh eyes helps me understand what I want to change or improve the next day.

What do you struggle with the most in your creative work, and how do you confront it?

In recent years, I have been experimenting with different mediums and trying to bring my background in photography into them. While I feel confident working with photography after many years of practice, it can be difficult not to feel imposter syndrome when working in newer mediums.

What helps me overcome it is curiosity. The desire to learn, experiment, and discover new possibilities is usually stronger than my doubts.

Which ideas, people, or works have most influenced the way you think?

In photography, I have been influenced by artists such as Lucas Blalock, Gregory Crewdson, Asger Carlsen, and Cindy Sherman. Their work has shaped the way I think about images and storytelling.

I also love visiting exhibitions and museums and discovering new artists. Many of my friends are artists, and their work often inspires me as well.

If you could change one thing about how people experience your work, what would it be?

I find beauty in things that are strange or unsettling. I also love the characters in my work and often see them as cute rather than scary.

I hope more people will notice the beauty in these unusual characters as well.

How to find Katya:
https://www.instagram.com/ezhingel/
https://ekaterina-zhingel.tilda.ws/

 

Interested in being interviewed for our blog or know someone who would like to be featured? Please reach out to us directly to explore any possibilities:
[email protected]

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May 27

Hand-Painted Studio Backdrops: How Colour and Texture Transform Photography

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Hand-Painted Studio Backdrops: How Colour and Texture Transform Photography

As some of you might know already, we’ve recently added eight new hand-painted studio backdrops to our collection at PL Photography Studio. Each backdrop is designed to bring depth, texture, and tonal variation into portrait, fine art, and fashion photography, offering a more organic alternative to paper backgrounds.

 

Unlike standard studio backgrounds, hand-painted backdrops respond to light in subtle, beautifully unpredictable ways. They create natural gradients, soft imperfections, and painterly surfaces that change depending on positioning and lighting.

The History of Painted Backgrounds in Portraiture

Before photography existed, portrait artists relied entirely on painted environments. From Renaissance portraiture to Baroque studio practices, backgrounds were never empty — they were constructed spaces designed to control mood, hierarchy, and focus.

Artists such as Vermeer and Rembrandt used muted tones, earth colours, and soft transitions to ensure the subject remained central while still being embedded in the atmosphere. Backgrounds were not decorative; they were psychological tools.

Bust of a young woman by Rembrandt, 1632


Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, dated c. 1665

This approach still influences visual storytelling today, more so in photography, where lighting and backdrop work together to shape perception.

How Hand-Painted Backdrops Work in Photography

In a studio setting, hand-painted backdrops behave very differently from printed or seamless paper backgrounds. Because the surface is physically textured and layered with paint, it reacts to light in uneven and organic ways.

This creates subtle shifts in colour and depth depending on:

  • the distance between the subject and the backdrop
  • the angle and softness of the light source
  • the colour temperature of the lighting
  • the positioning of the subject within the frame

Even small movements can significantly change the final image, making the backdrop an active part of the composition rather than a passive surface.

Practical Tips for Using Studio Backdrops

  • Place subjects at varying distances to control separation and depth
  • Use soft or directional light to reveal texture and painterly detail
  • Experiment with colour contrast between the subject and the backdrop
  • Allow negative space — simplicity often strengthens the composition
  • Adjust positioning subtly to explore tonal shifts within the same setup

These backdrops are designed to work with light, not against it, making them especially effective for natural light studio photography and controlled lighting setups alike.

Why Hand-Painted Backdrops Matter in Modern Studio Photography

In an increasingly digital visual culture, hand-painted studio backdrops reintroduce all the things we so secretly crave deep inside: physicality, imperfection, and material depth into the photographic process. They bridge the gap between painting and photography, between past and present, offering a more tactile and expressive, hard-to-resist visual language.

The result is imagery that feels very atmospheric. It is closer to classical portraiture in mood and philosophy, but fully contemporary in execution.

Book Studio Time and Explore the Backdrops

Our full collection of hand-painted backdrops is available to use in all bookings at PL Photography Studio. If you’re looking to experiment with texture, colour, and more painterly portrait setups, the studio is designed for exactly that.

→ Book studio time
https://plphotostudio.co.uk/product/booking/

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May 27

Anna Archen: “The biggest struggle in my creative work is doubt.”

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Anna Archen is a visual artist working across photography and digital collage, with a background in commercial and beauty imagery. Her work centres on the human body and the ways presence and identity are carried through physical form. Through portraiture, she is drawn to unusual features and distinctive faces, exploring beauty, vulnerability, and intimacy with a controlled, restrained sensibility. Her images balance sensuality with distance, approaching the intimate in a way that feels precise, composed, and quietly poetic.

 

-What experience first made you realise you were an artist?

-I always felt like an artist long before I was able to call myself one confidently. Since childhood, I was constantly drawing and later studied painting and fine art at university, but more broadly, creating images was always my natural way of understanding and interacting with the world – through colour, composition, and visual form. I was always drawn to building something carefully constructed and shaped by my own vision, almost like creating a controlled world or moment through images. Even when photography eventually replaced drawing and painting as my main medium, I was never interested in documentary-style image-making. What fascinated me was the ability to construct a frame completely, especially through the presence of the human body and face.

-What does a typical day look like for you – in work and in life?

-I don’t really have a typical day, because my life constantly shifts between shooting, researching, producing, retouching, and developing ideas. Some days are very collaborative and socially intense – especially during pre-production, when I’m coordinating teams and trying to bring a project together – while others are completely solitary and spent editing, researching, or building moodboards at home. On shoot days, I usually arrive at the studio a few hours early, put on music, and start setting up the lights; that quiet preparation feels almost meditative to me. I’m very detail-oriented and naturally drawn to control, but the best shoots happen when I stop overthinking and fully trust the process, the team, and my own instincts. Outside of work, I spend a lot of time walking, visiting galleries and museums, and looking for moments that shift my perspective or visually recharge me. I also find it difficult to separate my artistic practice from commissioned work. Emotionally, I tend to invest myself fully in both.

-What do you struggle with the most in your creative work, and how do you confront it?

-The biggest struggle in my creative work is doubt – questioning whether what I’m making is truly meaningful in a world already oversaturated with images and constant visual noise. There are periods where I feel uncertain or vulnerable about my work, but over time, I’ve stopped seeing those feelings as something I need to ‘fix.’ I’ve learned to accept doubt as a natural part of being an artist and to keep creating alongside it rather than waiting for complete confidence to arrive. Usually, the more I resist those feelings, the stronger they become, while acceptance allows them to pass eventually.

-Which ideas, people, or works have most influenced the way you think?

-I was strongly shaped by classical painting and my academic art education. Artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon have influenced the way I think about the body, portraiture, and psychological presence, even if their visual language doesn’t directly appear in my work. At the same time, many of my influences come from smaller and more personal things – childhood memories, everyday moments, and the constant flow of images I absorb. Over time, that becomes part of an internal visual memory that naturally feeds into my practice.

-If you could change one thing about how people experience your work, what would it be?

-I don’t think I would want to change the way people experience my work. Once an image is finished and released into the world, different people will inevitably respond to it in different ways. And I’m comfortable with that. The only thing I would hope for is openness – a willingness to look without immediately judging or trying to categorise what they see.

Where to find Anna: https://www.instagram.com/annaarchen/

Interested in being interviewed for our blog or know someone who would like to be featured? Please reach out to us directly to explore any possibilities:
[email protected]

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Apr 29

How to Use Natural Light: The Most Honest Tool in the Studio

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There is a certain kind of image that feels effortless the moment you see it. Nothing is overworked, nothing feels imposed. The light just exists, and it is soft, dimensional, and quietly precise. More often than not, that’s natural light.

Before photography studios were filled with modifiers, strobes, and complex setups, there was simply the window. And it’s no coincidence that some of the most enduring portraits — from painting to early photography — were built around it. Natural light, instead of impressing you, reveals. And in a studio setting, that honesty becomes a powerful advantage.

At PL Photography Studio, this light comes primarily from south-facing skylight windows. Being on the top floor means the studio receives a consistent flow of daylight throughout the day, with direct sunlight strongest around midday. Unlike standard side windows, skylight windows create a more even, top-down illumination that fills the space while still allowing for shape and depth.

What makes this setup particularly effective is how responsive it is. Natural light is never static. It shifts with time, intensity, and weather. In the studio, you can work with these changes rather than against them.

Small adjustments make a significant difference. Rotating your subject will change how shadows fall across the face, while moving them in and out of brighter or softer areas of the space will affect contrast and definition. Shifting the backdrop also alters how much light it receives, subtly changing the overall tone and colour balance of the image.

That’s the part people often overlook: you’re not building light from scratch but shaping what’s already there. And psychologically, it does something important, too. Subjects tend to relax more in natural light. There’s no harsh flash, no interruption, no mechanical rhythm. The shoot flows. Expressions feel less performed and more observed. You get closer to something unforced — which, in portraiture, is usually the point.

How to work with it:

  • Start by uncovering the skylight windows and observing how the light drops into the space — it behaves differently from side windows, falling more vertically and evenly
  • Rotate your subject gradually — with the light coming from skylight windows, even subtle turns will shift shadows under the eyes, cheekbones, and jaw in a much more sculptural way
  • Move the backdrop incrementally — because the light is coming from above, small shifts will change how much light reaches it, subtly altering tone and separation
  • Use reflectors or bounce (floor or side) to reintroduce light into the face if needed
  • Experiment with partially drawing the curtains to diffuse or narrow the light — this gives you control over intensity and direction without artificial modifiers
  • Shoot at different times of day — top light evolves beautifully, from soft and ambient to more directional and dramatic

Natural light in this setting behaves differently. It is less obvious but far more sculptural once you understand it. It doesn’t flood the subject from the side; it carves from above. Which means you’re not just lighting a face but shaping structure. And once you start working with it, you realise something quite simple: you don’t always need more equipment. You just need to pay closer attention.

Practice this in a real studio setting
Our space is designed to make the most of natural light — giving you flexibility without complexity, and control without over-engineering.

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Apr 24

Miki Węcel: “I’m trying to find time to be good at a few different things.”

By Q&A No Comments

Miki Węcel is a photographer and musician whose practice moves fluidly between image and sound. For a long time, both disciplines have been the centre of his attention — less as separate paths than as parallel ways of working toward a single creative focus. His work reflects an ongoing commitment to shaping a life where these two practices are not occasional pursuits, but the core of what he does.

-What experience first made you realise you were an artist?
-I think that came very late; I never considered myself to be an artist until I joined the film industry by chance. Just being surrounded by so many people following their passions, I realised that maybe I too could do that, and I started looking for my thing (it’s always been music, though, really). At some point, I realised that I may have a bit of a knack for photography and decided that I had some catching up to do because I started so late, and I started to explore and learn.

-What does a typical day look like for you — in work and in life?
-I jump between a lot of things. I’m trying to find time to be good at a few different things to bring them together and form a cohesive visual world of sound and vision. I‘m also fighting against losing focus on what I should be doing. I often stay up late into the night and listen to weird electronic music and catch up on things then. Having headphones on and a lightweight beat definitely helps.

 

 

-What do you struggle with the most in your creative work, and how do you confront it?
-So, as I said above, I really struggle with focus and not just getting into a lengthy task, but also staying on it long enough to complete it in one sitting. I’ve been trying more and more to reduce the number of distractions in my life and find ways to squeeze the amount of time I have in a day to give more to learning my craft.

-Which ideas, people, or works have most influenced the way you think?

-More than any other it would be John Frusciante, just in his approach to music making, where everything has an idea, and each idea is explored, and there’s always a vision guiding it all. In terms of photography, though, first and foremost, I love Jack Davison’s work; it’s got a bit of silliness and lightness to it that at the same time can be gritty and raw. And possibly on a different side of the spectrum, I adore the compositions and attention to detail in Sarah Van Rij’s photographs; that’s the kind of precision I aspire to have in my images.

-If you could change one thing about how people experience your work, what would it be?
-That’s an interesting question, and I guess maybe it would be for them to try to see something else within the frame. There’s often a story in my head that explains the composition of the photo, maybe it’s the interaction between two objects or the way something fills the frame that suggests something about how it wants to be looked at.

Where to find Miki: https://www.instagram.com/mikiwecel

Interested in being interviewed for our blog or know someone who would like to be featured? Please reach out to us directly to explore any possibilities:
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