Teen Photo Wonder Tells Tales

Forget your fairy godmothers and frog princes. This fairy tale is of a very different character from the light-hearted bedtime stories of childhood: more Grimm, one might say, than Disney.

Photographer Dasha Yastrebova, 19, revealed her latest project, "Fairy Tale of Dasha Yastrebova," in the Pobeda Gallery on Feb. 18. Through this collection, Dasha reveals a level of creative talent, artistic ingenuity and uniqueness of perspective that explains why she has received so much attention from the art community at such a young age.

The project consists of a set of 40 unnamed pictures of a variety of subjects, united by a level of fantasy and a lack of conventional beauty. Indeed, each piece contains an element conveying a certain sense of disturbance: a dirty face, a broken shoe, a blurred body, a piercing glare. Furthermore, not one frame contains more than two individuals. "I am doing a study of the psychology of man," Yastrebova explained. "One comes closer to the unconscious, the soul, of man through an examination of an individual rather than of a group."

Jessica Lee / for MT The photographs aim to bring visitors into Yastrebova's fairy-tale world.

Yastrebova received her first camera at the age of 15 -- a gift from her father. Born into a family of artists, she became the vehicle through which her parents attempted to realize their unfulfilled ambitions. From 8 years old, she was introduced to artist circles and schools, later taking courses at Sergei Andriaky's watercolor school and then at the International Movie School of Moscow. After realizing that she could not fulfill her creative ambitions through painting alone, Dasha turned toward photography. At age 15, Dasha was given free use of the basement of a gallery on Solyanka Ulitsa, where she began developing her photography.

Success came quickly. Using the online medium of LiveJournal as her first platform for self-presentation, Yastrebova drew attention to her art and by the age of 17 received an offer to work with the journal Afisha. Since then, she has succeeded in doing work for multiple magazines -- including Russian Vogue, Bolshoi Gorod, Afisha and Afisha World and Rolling Stone -- and has participated in several photography exhibitions.

In this latest project, Dasha's art and painting background is quite evident. Not one photograph is taken of its subject in a spontaneous, natural state. Each is posed, a deliberate creation of the photographer. It is not an attempt to capture life as it presently exists but rather to craft a new world.

On one wall, a piece portrays a girl standing before a white sheet, arms marked with slashes reaching upward toward her face. Her whitened eyes gazing above, combined with clawlike fingers stretching upward, create an image of a girl possessed by demons. On the right side of this piece sits a shot of a lone, obese man swaddled below the waist in a single white sheet, sitting upright in the middle of a metal-framed hospital bed that rests in a sea of black. His nose and mouth are covered with a black scarf, revealing only his eyes.

Individually, each photograph can stand alone as a piece of unique art. Taken together, however, the works function to carry the observer, as Yastrebova said, "from his own reality deeper into the fairy-tale theme inspired from my childhood."

"The Fairy Tale of Dasha Yastrebova" is on till March 29 at the Pobeda Gallery at the Winzavod, located at 4 Ciromyatnichecky Pereulok. 1, Metro Chkalovskaya. Open daily (excluding Mondays) from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. www.pobedagallery.com.