MD | PHOTOGRAPHY

About

Hey there. I'm a photographer and mixed media artist based in Richmond, VA by way of New Orleans, LA and Moscow, Russia. Having grown up between two cultures and languages, my creative work explores the themes of identity, memory, belonging, storytelling, and humanity's impact on the environment.

I have a BA from the University of Virginia in studio art and art history, and have traveled widely with my camera capturing images and stories on both analog and digital formats. I've exhibited my work in the US and at the Italian La Guarimba Film Festival in collaboration with Amor Vacui Architecture Studio, have been featured in Defend New Orleans, and have collaborated with Bayou Magazine. I travel often for freelance photography assignments, and am an FAA Part 107 certified drone pilot. 

The ongoing PANS project was inspired by the work of Italo Calvino and continues to be a working illustration of the writer’s novella, Invisible Cities using multiple exposure street photography in real cities. At present these photographic re-imaginings exist here at degtiarenko.com as scrollable stories (Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, etc.) and on 35mm film. The technique involves using manually set progressions of in-camera multiple exposures on 35mm analog film with a 1977 Mamiya camera, fomenting a parade of images and stories that hover between layered still photography and the frame-by-frame reels of early moving pictures. The film is developed, scanned, and minimally edited to present the textures and imperfections of the multiple exposures as authentically as possible in a digital format.