14 Plus: Young Women in Margarita Bagdasaryan’s Portfolio

— I just came back from Crimea [in September], I am sick of vacationing.

I went to see my friends, my Dad, and my brother. When I finished school there, I went to Kyiv to study to be an art critic. I dropped out because I realized I wanted to be an actress. I moved to Moscow, failed exams at theater school, but then remembered my second passion — cinema. I went to study at the Moscow School of New Cinema, Directing and Cinematography Department, with Fred Kelemen as our year’s curator. Now I am 24, I work as an assistant to a theater director, and I also do my personal photo projects.

I planned on making my own movie during my studies, so I was looking for character types for it everywhere. That was how I started taking pictures of people I liked on the subway, doing a sort of casting. Some of them I approached and explained to them who I was and why I needed their picture. We exchanged numbers and agreed on a photo shoot. My first model was 19-year-old two-meter-tall Polina whom I noticed on the street. And she remains my favorite. As a result of this casting, I have a large database, and I put off my idea for the movie.

I managed to implement the idea with sleeping and tired people in the exhibition project called Russian Death. I printed black-and-white photographs of people sleeping on the subway that I took on a Leica. I didn’t really know my way with film back then, so the images turned out dark and gloomy, but that was kind of the mood of the series, so it worked. I put the photographs on sheet pans and poured water over them. The exhibition lasted for one and a half months, and in this time the photographs almost disappeared. This was my original idea: dead tired.

The exhibition lasted for one and a half months, and in this time the photographs almost disappeared.

One time, I saw a 14-year-old girl with her grandmother. I approached them, asked grandma for the girl’s mother’s number, and agreed with her about a photo shoot. Vera came to the meeting alone and immediately hugged me for some reason.

Why do I mostly take photographs of young women? I don’t know. It just happened somehow. Everything starts from a person. I have an image in my mind, and then I need to make it come to life no matter what.

My models are mostly ready to being photographed naked. A naked body is a very powerful instrument that I use as an artist. However, there is a big problem with censorship on Facebook and Instagram: I can’t post photographs where female nipples are visible. As a result, I always keep that in mind during my shoots. Soon though I will open my own website where I will post everything without censorship.

I always keep that ban in mind during my shoots.

I use a Canon Mark 3D camera, I also sometimes use well-known tricks: for example, rub my lens with vaseline to make the picture more mysterious.

I am now working on a project where women with weapons will be photographed with Russian landscapes in the background. Vasilisa has a hunting gun in her arms that her friend loaned us. For Nastya, I bought a bow and arrows on the Avito advertisement website. There will be a new type of weapon every time, so now I am looking into that, too. I photograph my female characters on a film point-and-shoot camera, Olympus Mju II with a built-in flash — which provides me with a necessary primitivity effect.

The model that is most available to me is myself. Sometimes I have an idea, and I need to implement it no matter what. So I implement it on myself.