The In-Between Spaces: Elena Volkova on her Pride Portraits

By the time the last week of Pride Month rolls around I, for one, am usually a bit sick of rainbow everything. So photographer Elena Volkova’s latest series Pride Portraits is a welcome visual break from saccharine technicolor. Shot over the course of two days at Current Space earlier this month, Volkova’s black and white tintype portraits of the LGBTQ community offer a dignified, complex document of the city’s queer scene.

Simultaneously anachronistic and timely, the photos convey a range of feelings. Some sitters project confident swagger, others unabashed joy. And in a handful of portraits, there’s a slight weariness or uncertainty behind the smiles. Volkova decided offering these free, physical portraits to the LGBTQ community was important “in this day and age when bodies and personal decisions are politicized and under attack.”

The resulting photographs bear a gravitas beyond their physical weight—although in this era of culture wars and ever-looming threats of censorship, I find myself taking comfort in analog images as objects. Safely grounded in the physical, these photos are fiercely independent of the algorithms and whims of the private corporations that store most of our images digitally, as well as the regulatory bodies with oversight of their content. As so much of the world slides dangerously closer to 1984, there’s something strangely appropriate—or vaguely subversive, even—about embracing the technology of 1884.

After seeing the images, I caught up with Volkova over email to ask her about the project.

Michael Anthony Farley: For those unfamiliar, could you briefly describe how this photographic process works?

Elena Volkova: A tintype (or, wet plate collodion) is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with collodion and light-sensitive silver nitrate. During the sessions, each plate is hand-coated, exposed in camera, and developed instantly, with the process visible to the participants.

I see a bit of a parallel to your series of Ukrainian refugees in Berlin—which Laurence Ross wrote beautifully about for BmoreArt’s Collaboration Issue last year—though these were obviously shot under more joyous circumstances. Could you talk about these projects in relation to one another?

You’ve mentioned “joyous,” and that’s exactly how I think about creating these portraits: the act of creative “making together” is at the center of the process for the Ukrainian Portraits, as well as my other wet plate projects, including Pride Portraits.

Most joyous to me is to see the community come together, and what kind of the in-between spaces the process creates: people chat, meet each other, talk about their portraits and share insight on posing. As an introvert, I love that.

I struggle sometimes with respecting the life and natural evolution of my creative work; like my work has to find a conceptual framework to be more compelling and engaging. I have to remind myself of the importance of practice, of the actual making. Right now, these portrait projects simply feel like I have to do them—intuitively—and trust that conceptualization will naturally evolve. It’s a daunting and beautiful place: sort of like being a beginner and an expert at the same time.

I have always liked how you’ve previously mentioned that your sitters have the agency in these series. And this photography technique feels like it makes for happy accidents or a bit of unpredictability. It’s really refreshing to see an artist—particularly a photographer—surrender such a degree of control and “Authorship” with a capital “A” yet still create such beautiful image/objects. Is that something that’s always been an element of your practice, or did it take time to accept a bit of chaos in your work?

That’s a great question! Honestly, the process of posing people or giving directions of how sitters should be in front of the camera has never felt genuine to me, and always felt forced. I love observing people and seeing what they do naturally, how their sense of self shows through their body language and facial expressions; this approach feels more authentic.

With the Ukrainian project, we had conversations with the participants about what they would like these portraits to show. Almost everyone talked about feelings of uncertainty, as if being suspended; overall, I think the project has the tone of in-between-ness. When we were creating Pride Portraits, we asked folks how they wanted to pose, and what their portraits should say; and everyone had ideas about that! That kind of sense of agency, I think, really makes them beautiful. I say “we” here, because I don’t think that I’m making these portraits; I see it as a truly collaborative communal process.

In terms of accepting chaos, it’s a bit of a give-and-take: there are things I am interested in controlling, such as lighting and exposure; and things that I am not interested in controlling, for example, what chemicals do and people’s behavior. Photography can be quite a rigid and fixed medium; I want my work to have a sense of openness, even if it is made on rigid metal plates.

Elena Volkova will be speaking on a panel of artists this Thursday, 6/27, at the School 33 Art Center.

She will be discussing the aforementioned portraits of Ukrainian refugees, as well as other work produced in response to her trip to Germany last year. That body of work is presently on view at the School 33 art center in Transmission, a group show comprising recipients of the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore Artist Travel Prize from 2017–2023. Other featured artists include Nate Larson, Erin Fostel, Erick Antonio Benitez, LaToya Hobbs, Joe Giordano, Hoesy Corona, Schroeder Cherry, Rosa Leff, Jackie Milad, and Jill Orlov. Read Cara Ober’s review of the exhibition here.