Yola Monakhov

Capture Fields is a combination of two larger projects:

In Post-Photography, pinhole cameras are sent via post and courier to create exposures of a parcel transit, beneath the ceilings of sorting facilities, inside delivery trucks, and along neighborhood carriers’ rounds. Like surveillance drones or stories in their retelling, these operator–less cameras take independent journeys, and produce images with a formal vocabulary inherent in the camera’s optics, and the chemical life of light–sensitive materials. This work is featured in the June 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

In Field Guide to Bird Songs, living birds in the field are closely examined while exploring the connection between seeing, knowing, and wanting. In detailed, hyper–real photographs that recall the decorative drawings of natural history, the work evokes the delicate experience of holding a bird, against traditions of landscape representation in religious iconography, Renaissance frescoes and tapestries, and Modernist painting and sculpture.  Through collaborations with scientists, ecologists, and naturalists on the Massachusetts coast, and at universities and research centers across the Northeast and in Costa Rica, the photographer gained access to wild birds captured for banding, before their release, and those captive in labs.

Yola Monakhov was born in Moscow, Russia. She completed her MFA at Columbia University in 2007 and her MA in Italian Literature in 1998. She has been a photographer for The New Yorker magazine since 2006 and received a Meredith S. Moody award from Yaddo as well as a Macina di San Cresci Fellowship from Greve in Chianti. She is currently a faculty member at Columbia University, Pace University, International Center of Photography, and LaGuardia Community College.

Visit Yola's website at yolamonakhov.com!