Photographs have such a huge meaning to me. As I was working on my identity as an artist and was trying to figure out why and when I started to love photography, I remembered that my favorite time spending was looking at my mom’s and dad’s photographs. My mommy had those HUGE albums packed all the way up in the closet, and every new friend I’d make eventually would have to be tortured for at least three hours as I showed my family’s photographs: here is my parents wedding day, here is my grandparents and uncles and cousins, and here is my mom’s best friend, oh wait, see there is my mom in college dressed up and dancing, here is my dad in Army… As I turned the page for the thousandth time I couldn’t help but say WOW! And look again and again. I can only imagine what my friends thought of me in moments like those! Albums had that smell…if I’d try to describe it, I’d have to mix all the emotions captured, all the laughter and cries and sunshine and rains and even then I still would be out of words and not able to give you a slightest idea how fascinatingly magnificent those albums smelled!!!!! They all had this sheer paper in between pages to protect photographs and my mom decorated them all with her drawings. I’d spent hours drooling over them and begging my mom to teach me how to draw like that, or draw me the same little picture… For some reason few colors practically stand out in my memory: “dirty blue”, almost pastel looking navy blue ( I think it appeared dirty to me cause the album cover material was suede) and bright orange with a painting of Kremlin on it; and of course red. I think those were the album colors, although I am not sure and I’ve been begging my mom to bring those albums to me ( they are back in Russia) but she of course told me it is not possible at this time since they are enormously big and HEAVY! I am telling you - I can not wait to get my hands on those babies: smell them, play with pages and look at all the pictures!!! Exciting! So, as you can see, I was pretty passionate about photographs and the memories they hold from the get go. To me, pictures are pure magic.

As I was editing pictures, I stumbled upon few really funny pictures of my daughter and it brought tears to my eyes. Sometimes I have to take Gabriella with me to a photoshoot and she is usually a good sport about it, but every now and then she acts up of course as any 3 year old would. Her attention span is very short. But as I looked at this picture I couldn’t help but laugh. Cause I remember I was telling Sebastien to act certain way and he had a hard time “getting” it, when I heard Gabby say: Look, Sebastien, do it like this and she did exactly what I was telling him to do! LOL ( I was asking him to dance around, pretend he plays guitar, so imagine how funny Gabriella looked)  From that point on I kept snapping pictures of her in between when she was getting her “modeling” act out… I know, many years from today we both will look at this photograph and laugh! And I will tell her the story behind it. And she will tell her kids and they will tell their friends and their kids…and THAT is MAGIC!