POETRY OF EXISTENCE

NATASSA KOURI

// In Natassa´s opinion a photo contains moments in time and a lot of searching. With this series she wanted to create a dialogue between youth and beauty, the beauty of nature and the beauty of a young woman, drawing a parallel between the shapes of lilies and the female body. She calls her project the Poetry of Existence.

Born in Corinth and now living in Akrata, Greece, Natassa has been involved in photography for several years, attending photography seminars, workshops and editing courses. She has participated in group exhibitions, competitions and photography projects. For her, photography means capturing the soul, capturing emotions, or rather, it is an emotion expressed through light and darkness.

“When people look at my pictures, i want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice .”

Robert Frank

What draws you to art?

“My relationship with art is therapeutic for me because that is how I express the creative and the melancholic view that liberates me. Art, after all, is like fertile ground , it will always find ways to illuminate, even the darkest winters, like the one we all experienced* … The only thing the creator owes is loyalty.”

*the winter Natassa is referring to is the one of the year 2020/21, dominated as it was by the difficulties of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What do you like best about this photographic project?

“The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky advised young artists not to separate work from their life, to create through it – not to distance themselves, art uses life itself as material and not the other way around. And to live is to make yourself vulnerable. Vulnerable and fragile like my lilies …”

Natassa is a creative photographer who works both in colour and in black and white. For this series she set out to create photographic frames that look harmonious and reveal the poetry of existence.

The idea of this project was completely spontaneous. “I love lilies very much and my vase at home was full of lilies. I liked the curves they created as well as their shadows, so I started photographing them at home, in the difficult days of the quarantine, always using natural light.” Natassa conceived the project in black and white from the beginning, because the white of the lilies with their large dark leaves would pop out a lot and their shadows and lines would look more intense in black and white. “This expresses me a lot, because through the few shades of gray, a multitude of emotions are captured,” she says. “These curves of flowers and their fragility reminded me of the curves of a female body, of a fragile, pure female existence. The simplicity and purity of the lilies and the female body touch on the simplicity of poetry, the poetry of existence.”

Because these are paired images, we have departed from our usual layout. Click on the photos to see a larger version.