When I was a child (in Russia), my parents took me to a small village every summer. A real village, surrounded by forests and fields, not a summer-house settlement. I would wander around for hours, breathing in the scent of flowering meadows. That smell became, for me, the smell not only of childhood, but of freedom and happiness.
Now I live in another country — it doesn’t really matter which one. But there are no such meadows here, no such grasses that can bring back that feeling of childhood happiness.
Herbarium is not about botany. It is not even a documentary record of the plants I remember from childhood. I simply wandered through Armenia and breathed. I was completely happy. And it was there that I suddenly realized how much I had missed the smell of a meadow.
I am a photographer. I can take almost anything with me if I photograph it the way I see it. So that is what I did. I tried to photograph the feeling of meeting something I had lost through emigration.
I photographed these plants somewhere between documentation and abstraction, letting parts of them disappear into shadows and soft focus. I did this intentionally. It feels close to the way my memory works: when I try to remember, some things come back clearly, while others always slip away.
The series is not finished. It has only just begun, I will return.
