Photographer Lev Mazaraki: "Photography Is a Reflection of One's Inner World"

The phrase "photography is a reflection of one's inner world" may sound like a cliché. But beneath it lies a profound idea. Photographer Lev Mazaraki explores how personal experience, emotions, and convictions manifest in every frame.

Right after buying a car, a driver starts noticing that same model everywhere. In reality, there aren't more of them on the road; it's just that their attention now picks them out. Attention follows what already lives inside us. The exact same mechanism operates in photography. "Why, out of dozens of possible moments in life, does a photographer stop at this particular one? Because a frame is, in essence, an act of selective attention," says Mazaraki.

"Eyes receive an enormous amount of visual information, but the mind can't process it all with equal attention. Attention works like a filter," he explains. "It highlights certain details and leaves others at the periphery. This choice is shaped by our expectations, experience, fears, desires, and overall emotional state. Someone in love tends to notice light and faces. An anxious person might pick up on tense gestures and empty spaces between people. Someone feeling lonely can see loneliness even in the middle of a noisy celebration," says Lev Mazaraki.

 

Where are photographers in photos?

"The inner world reveals itself not only in the subject of a shot," continues Mazaraki. "It's visible in dozens of nearly invisible decisions." A photographer chooses the distance. One moves in so close to a person that there's nowhere to hide in the frame. Another stays across the street and photographs through glass or a doorway.

A photographer chooses the moment. "At a sports match, they can capture the winning shot or the tense face of the defeated opponent. It's the same event, but the stories will be completely different. The same thing happens in travel photography. One person comes back with grand facades and sunsets. Another notices a morning street cleaning or laundry hanging on balconies. Both visited the same city, but they saw it differently," notes Lev Mazaraki.

Finally, a photographer chooses the frame's boundaries. In reality, the scene continues in all directions, but a photograph always has edges. By showing one thing, an author inevitably hides another. Even the placement of the horizon or the amount of empty space above a subject's head changes the tone of a photo.

After a shot, says Mazaraki, another selection begins. Behind a single published photograph may lie hundreds of rejected ones. Why did an author keep the frame where a person looks uncertain, rather than the one where they're smiling? Why choose a slightly blurry photo over a technically flawless one?

 

What do photographs say about their authors?

Lev Mazaraki recalls Robert Frank, one of the most influential documentary photographers of the 20th century. Born in Switzerland, he traveled across the United States after moving there. The result was the book The Americans. In the famous shot "Trolley, New Orleans," passengers gaze out from the streetcar. They are divided by window frames and by the racial segregation laws in effect at the time. An ordinary urban scene becomes an image of a society partitioned into separate compartments. Another passerby might have seen transport or advertising. Frank saw division because he was photographing his own feelings of that country.

German photographer Michael Schmidt photographed Berlin for his series Waffenruhe (Truce) between 1985 and 1987. He hardly photographed the Berlin Wall itself. "Mostly, there were dilapidated buildings, unkempt greenery, and faces of lost people. Schmidt abandoned conventional documentary in favor of these frames. He showed his own sense of anxiety and fragmentation," says Lev Mazaraki.

"There was also the famous photographer Ernst Haas, who shot bullfighting in Spain in the 1950s," he continues. Most photojournalists in that genre chased sharpness and the exact moment of culmination. Haas, however, deliberately slowed his shutter speed, blurring the movement of the bull and matador almost into abstraction. He wasn't interested in the brutality of the fight but in the flowing, almost dance-like rhythm of the encounter. Haas admitted that he sought not a description of reality but its subjective transformation.

"But photographers don't always consciously turn personal experience into an artistic language. Sometimes the inner world reveals itself only gradually," says Mazaraki. This, he notes, is what happened with Vivian Maier, an American street photographer who only gained recognition posthumously. For most of her life, she worked as a nanny, photographing urban life in her spare time. Her vast archive was discovered by chance and began to be published only in the 21st century. Today, Maier is regarded as a significant figure in the history of street photography. In her numerous self-portraits, her figure appears in mirrors, shop windows, shadows, and metallic surfaces. Sometimes only the camera is visible; other times, Maier's reflection merges with the figures of passersby. "Of course, we can't know exactly what Maier felt at the moment of photographing. It would be too simplistic to declare her reflections proof of loneliness. Yet the pattern is obvious. A private person, who never sought to show her work to the public, repeatedly inserted her own presence into the image," says Lev Mazaraki.

"Photography is connected to reality, but it is not a neutral copy of it. Because authors always show the world from a specific physical and psychological point," he notes. Therefore, when looking at a photo, he suggests asking two questions: What was happening in front of the camera, and why did a photographer choose to show it this way? The answer to the first one tells about the event. The answer to the second one tells about an author.

"When I look through my own photographs, I see not only people and places. I notice traces of my own states of mind. What I moved toward and what I wanted to preserve. They say that over time, a portfolio becomes a self-portrait, even if a photographer doesn't appear in a single frame. That's true," says Mazaraki.