Valentin Bo to David Lynch

I first saw “Twin Peaks” when I was eight years old. I can still see the blue TV light filling up the room and the other — warm and orange — leaking through from the hall. Obviously, at that time, I couldn’t really grasp the meaning behind the story or who exactly this David Lynch man was. Nevertheless, I was utterly fascinated by the mysterious events occurring on the screen. So much was my gaze (and mind) apparently glued to the screen that once my mom came into the room to find me lying on top of my desk. She, of course, inquired as to what exactly was happening. There was a snap that brought me back to reality, but still, I couldn’t answer. My childhood memories are pretty fuzzy and I can’t even remember what my school desk looked like. But the image of Ben Horne eating a carrot in his office seems to be permanently engraved in my mind.

Later, when I got older, I rewatched the series and saw other works by Lynch that I realised for me he became the most prominent figure in cinematography. The man who bewitched all those billions of people with his mystical fluctuating world filled with some questions the answers to which are hidden in our subconscious. And others to which you wouldn’t want to find the answers to.

As Lynch’s idol, the artist Oskar Kokoschka once said: “The fourth dimension [in my art] is a projection of myself”. And so the characteristic features of Lynch’s creations became a deep connection to art and the reflections of his own traumatic experience (such as seeing his neighbor planting a bullet on his head or a blood-covered woman wandering the street was, by all means, a traumatic experience for a child). Notably, Lynch managed to transform his experience into the appeal to the depths of the viewer’s perception with the means of certain narrative techniques.

25 years have passed and now Lynch is visiting Kyiv. I have lost sleep over the desire to photograph the grand maestro. But I wasn’t going to settle for a mere mugshot — I needed to create a unique context (significant, primarily, for me). To tell my own story about that first impression of a child. And so some utterly incompatible objects, reflecting and interpreting my inner self, came to inhabit my shots. One of them was him levitating in a vessel. He who I created with my own hands. He who became the fruit of my personal experiences.

An idea in the creation of an idea. A glass vessel appearing in David’s hand – a substance arising from something he so frequently touches while running his fingers through the air.

We would like to thank the Territory of the Positive (which airs on the Priamyi channel courtesy of Snizhana Yehorova) team for helping organize the shoot.