Laima Vainiņa


  Laima Vainiņa


I'm a freelance photographer living and working in Riga, Latvia.
If I need to describe my style i would say it's very intuitive, based on my emotions and sense of light, place and time at the current moment. There is a desire to discover, a tendency to investigate and at the same time the interest in construction of new meanings.
Basically I prefer to capture people I know. I mainly take photographs of my younger sister and brother,
through them, I try to reveal the way they perceive the world and the relationship between the two of them, identity in development, alone and together.
 I realize that sometimes portraits of another person works more like reflections of myself.
 Also I have a lot of self-portraits.
For me making self-portraits is much easier than making a portrait of another person.
Sexuality, gender and cultural identity are the main themes I'm interested in.
My photographs are never just about the body as an object, they're a way of abandoning isolation and meeting with other interpretations of oneself that have appeared over time.
I mainly shoot digital, but recently I feel, ever so often, the need to use film. In most cases processing doesn't require that much time, you don't have to check your 50 last taken photos on a screen display to ensure whether any of them are worthwhile, thereby ending up missing what’s happening around you. When using analogue you take care in thought and preparation, before finally pushing the button, spending more time observing, investigating and connecting with the surrounding.
In a time when the creation of an image has become such a fast process that doesn't require any training or background knowledge, when speed and quantity have become more important than profundity and quality, it seems crucial to me, taking the time to stop and think, wherein the essence of analogue photography prevails. 
 Also I'm a freelance writer. I'm writing and interviewing only photographers. Basically it's in my native Latvian language, but there is some examples in English: FK Magazine.