A photographer's take on analog documentation in a digital world

Transcript

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Judy Woodruff: Tonight’s Brief But Spectacular features artist Uldus Bakhtiozina.

The award-winning photographer explains her vision of documenting dreams.

It’s part of our ongoing Canvas series.

Uldus Bakhtiozina: I’m not a documentary photographer in the common sense, but I am a documentary photographer in a different sense. I document dreams.

My photography is widely exposing theme of escapism. All of us struggle sometimes to escape in order to analyze our reality. I love complicated personalities. And, actually, real life inspires me to create my images.

I choose to work with people who are survivors, who are fighting everyday routines that are not always full of color. What I really find exciting is the ability to make people’s dreams of being someone else a reality.

Sometimes, it take months to actually prepare everything for the shoot. This process, like, of getting ready is 95 percent of the time. And 5 percent is actual just the shooting.

Real life inspires our escape. And, sometimes, that escape is very needed. Irony is still the key in what I’m doing, because I believe that, in our life, it’s a lot of sadness. We need a little bit of irony to art as well.

Digitally manipulated photograph is not really true for me. It doesn’t capture anything real. That’s like, instead of going traveling, you just look at someone else travel photographs.

I work with analogue. In spite of the fact that, nowadays, digitally you can create pretty much everything, I don’t like this path. I see the beauty in authenticity of making. And that’s impossible without flaws.

I see the future of photography 95 percent is digital, and I’m very happy about that, because that makes me special.

My name is Uldus Bakhtiozina. This is my Brief But Spectacular take on documenting dreams.

Judy Woodruff: And you can find more Brief But Spectaculars on our Web site.