Nastassja Nefjodov

How often are you turning the camera towards yourself?

And when you do so, what do you experience, understand or learn ... about yourself, about your practice, about your process?

I turned the camera towards myself whilst being in a creative block, not knowing how to push my project further, not knowing what the project needs and what it’s actually about.

It was a way to just stay busy, to experiment with a new medium I had not used before (Polaroid), to stay detached from the outcome and overcome the frustration of not knowing.

One portrait a day, documenting my mood, confronting me with myself and my creative block. It became a joyful habit. And a couple months later suddenly I understood my project was exactly about that: being blocked and not seeing clearly. So I was actually working hard on my project while thinking I was just doing something random to keep myself creating.

Just to keep showing up to my practice during a creative block turned out to become a key element of a later work.