ALEXANDER Sennikov. NATURALMS

Today, my guest is a wonderful photographer Alexander Sennikov, who will please us with emotional and expressive still lifes. Looking at his work, you involuntarily feel a desire to embark on rapturous epithets. 🙂 However, Alexander’s photos are good not only because they bring forth warm memories – they are good “photographically”. Composition and light – the most important tools of any photographer – are used in the still lifes of the author competently and to the point.
But Alexander himself writes about creating his still lifes:
“I have long liked to look at the site where I laid out my macro, photographs — still-lifes of various authors. It was thought that in order to shoot like that, you need some kind of special equipment – illuminators, reflectors, screens, backgrounds, and so on. After some time I decided to try it, but, alas, it did not work out the way I wanted. I could not understand how this magic light is produced. But the wonderful master of still lifes Vladimir Dranitsyn opened my eyes. And, I think, not only me. He showed his lighting scheme, his acquired techniques – everything turned out to be much simpler in terms of equipment than I thought. Diffused light, an inclined plank to create a shadow, a nondescript background, a reflector made of light cardboard, ordinary objects that tend to gather dust on the far shelves in storerooms and sheds – and here it is a wonderful still life!
I made my first still lifes with old cameras, of which I have a whole suitcase (the old passion for collecting something was “useful”, as I can remember, I collected something all the time). I posted photos on the site – there was no violent reaction, but they didn’t scold too much. Just my father came back from a vacation that he spent in our native village in the Stavropol region, and brought at my request the few household items left over from past times – milk krynki, wooden spoons, a pot of iron, a kerosene lamp, an old grandfather’s razor …
He began to shoot still lifes in a rustic, so to speak, style – a dunk of milk, a loaf of bread, an old knife, a kerosene lamp.
And then a “momentous” event occurred, as I now understand it, an event that sent me to the channel in which I am still in — I found an old shopping bag, bright red, real, cotton. All those still lifes with old things that I saw on the site immediately came to my mind, I realized that it was not for nothing that they attracted me so much. Memories … About the past time, when we were carefree, loved, beautiful, funny, when parents were also young and beautiful, when everyone was healthy, and the most terrible problem was what to say to the father, when the math teacher wrote in a diary lesson! ”
And it began. I found something at home, something from my parents, in the country, in the garage, all the old things were transferred to the category of props and immediately removed from everyday use. Still lifes began to be removed by themselves, there was not enough space in my head to memorize all the plots I wanted to reproduce. ”