Jana Romanova
Women Photograph
St Petersburg, Russia
I work on assignments and personal long-term projects since 2009, focusing mainly on new ways to approaching political and ideological on a personal level. My works are build around the theme of collective identity and controversy of contemporary meaning of such terms as “family”, “beauty”, “duty”, “sacrificing” and “state”.
My long-term projects and commissions were published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, Stern, Russian Reporter, National Geographic (USA), PDN magazine, The British Journal of Photography, Independent, Internazionale (Italy), Geo (Germany, France, Russia), Eikon (Austria), OjodePez (Spain), European Photography (Germany), PhotoRAW (Finland), etc. and selected for a number of international exhibitions and festivals such as Format (Derby, UK), Chobi Mela (Dakha, Bangladesh), Encontros da Imagem (Braga, Portugal), the Backlight Festival (Tampere, Finland), Encuentros Abietros Festival (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and others.
2015 - European prospects grant for project in Wales, UK, 2015 - Les Recontres d’Arles Author’s book award , 2014 - Discovery of the Meeting Place
- Arts
- Breaking news
- Crisis
- Editorial
- Entertainment
- Environment
- Interview
- Portrait
- Video capture
- Video editing
From "Waiting" series
Jana Romanova
Young Russian couples, inhabitants of Saint-Petersburg and Moscow, are sleeping in their bedrooms early in the morning, the time when people don’t really care about their appearance, being natural. They are preparing to become parents in few months, and the project investigates not only their attitude to each other during the period of expecting a baby, but also the way young families live in big cities of modern Russia, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the country that will be known to their children only from history books.
From "The Alphabet of Shared Words"
Jana Romanova
In March 2014 the tension between Russia and Ukraine started to grow high, inspired by the informational war on the situation in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Citizens of both countries started to loose the desire to understand each other. Romanova asked different people who took part in the revolution in Kiev at the Square of Independence, to remember words which are absolutely the same both in Russian and Ukrainian languages and illustrate these words for the photographs — to make a sort of ABC, based on the idea that understanding starts from language, and language starts from alphabet.
From "The Book of Savior" project
Jana Romanova
When you say it in Russian language there is not much difference between two words: “spasatel’”(“rescue officer” or “firefighter”)” and “spasitel’”(“savior”, “redeemer”, “Jesus Christ”), but the connotations are almost opposite. Rescue officers come when something bad already happened, often they just carry dead bodies and basically they don’t prevent tragedy, but deal only with it’s consequences.
The original document is called “The Book of a rescue officer”, and all rescue officers in Russian Federation get one after their first certification. Every owner of this book has to fill it by hand, writing down all the accidents he was involved in as a rescue officer throughout his career. It becomes a sort of a lifetime experience record of seeing people suffering and dying almost every day. Jana Romanova spent two and a half years in a rescue division in Russia exploring what happens with your attitude to death when you see it every day.
