Here’s what Dina had to say about her motivations, the way she tells stories through her images, how her photography has changed, and the story behind her most challenging shot.
LG: What motivates you to keep on making images and being creative?
DB: What motivates people to breathe? Or rather, what motivates people to eat cake? It’s delicious!
Who needs additional motivation to crave something pleasant? A rush of dopamine after seeing a completed project is a solid motivation all by itself.
I’ve been working as a still-life photographer for 11 years. Sure, there are some parts of my job I don’t particularly like (mostly dealing with documents and cleaning my workplace after shooting lots of splashes!) but coming up with ideas and planning my photos have always been my favourite part.
Sometimes bringing an idea to life is difficult (and the gear is so heavy!), but when you’re sketching, you’re just sitting in a cosy chair with a nice cup of coffee and a notebook. What’s not to like? I need some motivation to go to a gym, because it can be quite unpleasant. But planning something interesting and fun to photograph? Oh, that’s a delight!
LG: What’s your favourite thing to photograph within your subject area and why?
DB: For many years, my usual answer was “coffee cups”, because they look relevant in a large variety of settings – from a vampire mansion to a space station.
Now I find the most joy working with natural materials such as moss, dried leaves, acorns, small tree branches, driftwood or stones. These little pieces of nature stay beautiful and meaningful even while they decay. And they always help me get closer to a fleeting feeling that something is coming to its end, which I find fascinating.
This “something is ending” vibe is hard to describe, and I feel like it’s always just out of reach. Getting closer to it by working with natural materials seems like a desirable side effect of my usual workflow.
LG: Has your work evolved or changed in the last couple of years? If so, how?
DB: Aside from better technique and better lighting, I notice a couple of trends, one being more complex stories.
I became a bit more demanding in relation to my viewer. I used to want my stories to be immediately understandable, as clear as possible. Now I don’t mind if they are a little ambiguous and even vague since it helps me invoke a wider spectrum of emotions. Not that my newest work is completely inaccessible or hard to understand, but it’s more open to a variety of interpretations.
Secondly, simpler backgrounds. I got tired of carefully arranging the details, which ended up blurred or darkened. Instead, I focused directly on my subjects, bringing only the details which work doubly hard, providing both the narrative and the atmosphere. This led me to cleaner, simpler backgrounds, often of solid colour. For now, it lets me stay focused on the most important parts of the image.
LG: Which is your favourite most recent image and why?
DB: Probably the one with an explosion of golden glitter and handmade clay palettes (below).
It’s all about the end of my favourite season, its colours and decay. Decay that happens to something else, not to you. It leaves you only as a witness to a beautiful ending but promising to be reborn.
I believe that despite all the action that’s going on here in this photo, it fits well into the still-life tradition thanks to the story it contains.
LG: Tell us the story behind your most difficult shot.
DB: Oh, that’s hard to pick! Especially when all the difficulties tend to fade away from memory. Well, let’s choose Upside Down Teatime (below).
Some people think there’s a lot of editing involved, but no. The main thing I did in Photoshop was to turn the image 180° and tweak some details. It meant I had to spend a couple of hours arranging the scene and planning the shot so it would look right in-camera. This also included gluing together two IKEA shelves and sacrificing the teapot to the God of Broken Glass (usually, my glassware is completely unharmed by my experiments, but that wasn’t the case here)!
I like this scene because I had a chance to approach it not only as a still-life arrangement but as a design riddle of sorts.
