Elizaveta Porodina on digging deeper with new book Found Dreams and the creative cosmos she’s created with Ariana Grande

If you don’t know Elizaveta Porodina by her name, you’ll know her by her photos. Since 2008, the Russia-born, Germany-based creative has turned her surrealist lens on celebrities and nature alike. Today, she boasts a portfolio filled with images of Zendaya, Kylie Jenner, Jodie Comer and Hoyeon, and her work frequently appears on the covers of global magazines. The 39-year-old has also worked on creative campaigns for Dior, Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier and Louis Vuitton. 

Before her creative career, Porodina worked as a clinical psychologist. Perhaps that’s why her art resonates well beyond its vivid, saturated colours and painting-like composition. “I believe that, in one way or another, everything an artist makes eventually becomes a self-portrait. We are compelled to return to the things our minds are trying to understand or heal,” says the photographer, confirming the introspective nature of her craft. 

Now, Porodina has culminated works from across her almost 14-year-long career, and funnelled them into her latest photo book, Found Dreams. Featuring a foreword from her long-term collaborator and international pop star Ariana Grande, the book spans editorials featuring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and studies of insects and flowers. “Editing this monograph marks my third collaboration with the amazing editor Julia Wagner. When you collaborate with someone over a long period of time, the editing process becomes a much deeper conversation — not only about individual images, but about how we both understand the work and the relationships between photographs,” she says.

Below, the photographer talks about the moment she and her husband stumbled upon the title Found Dreams, and why she’s living life more intensely than ever before.

Congratulations on your book, Found Dreams! What inspired the title?

I still remember the exact moment Found Dreams came to life. My husband Josef and I were sitting together, writing possible titles almost automatically onto a sheet of paper. We wanted to find it instinctively, very much in the Surrealist tradition of automatic writing, rather than manufacture something that sounded like the correct title for an art book. And then Found Dreams appeared. It immediately connected to something I deeply believe about making images: that the best image an artist can create is often not one they have carefully manufactured and controlled from A to Z. It feels more like something they were allowed to find; something that was already there, somewhere in the ether or the collective subconscious, waiting to be collected and given physical form. That is what Found Dreams means to me: a discovery of something that was already there, dreaming in wait.

How did you choose which of your works to include in your book?

Editing this monograph marks my third collaboration with the amazing editor Julia Wagner. When you collaborate with someone over a long period of time, the editing process becomes a much deeper conversation — not only about individual images, but about how we both understand the work and the relationships between photographs. We’re always looking for images that somehow speak to each other across the pages. Sometimes they are opposites; sometimes one begins a story and another finishes it. Sometimes they feel like best friends or enemies, or like two opposite sides of the moon. The book also has a larger narrative structure, almost like the descent of a person into a dream, so certain images began to belong together because they represented a particular phase of dreaming. In the end, that became much more important than simply including individual photographs I loved at the moment I made them.

It’s mentioned that the archetypes of the mother, heroine, warrior and shadow feature heavily. Why are you drawn to those particular archetypes?

I believe that, in one way or another, everything an artist makes eventually becomes a self-portrait. We are compelled to return to the things our minds are trying to understand or heal — sometimes obsessively — until we have understood the Gestalt of something enough for it to recede into the background and make space for another question. So without wanting to overanalyse myself too much, I assume these archetypes recur because they represent things I have encountered within myself. The mother doesn’t necessarily mean motherhood in the classical sense, but the part of me that takes on nurturing roles. The warrior might be the part that fights for my vision, but also the internal battles between fear and wonder, doubt and faith. And of course, we are all the protagonists of our own stories. The shadow perhaps feels the most universal of all. The shadow self, suffering, fear, contradiction — these are aspects of being human that I think all of us can recognise. I’m interested in giving those different selves a place to exist.