Pop Experiment: Aside from frosk.org, there are a few other websites (My Space, Photo Box) showcasing your work. Is this intentional or accidental?
Natasha: A lot of the times it is absolutely intentional. I love how the Internet links people with similar interests together on the same platform, and I have fallen in love with quite a little handfull with great online communities. Livejournal has been my top favorite for quite a few years now, it has a great friends-list-function where you can watch other people’s journals and it also have awesome privacy settings! I also try to frequent places like flickr, myspace and probably a dozen more, mostly because I have come upon amazing, but quite different people on each individual site, so it is hard to gather all my forces in one place! I try to reply to everybody who sends me a message somewhere, but it might take me a little time before people get their answers!
The photobox site is a bit quirky for me as I know nothing about it! It must have been somebody else featuring my images on there. Even though I am grateful for the publicity, I would normally appreciate if people asked before they pasted my images on a web page I dont have control over though!
Pop Experiment: Do you make a living with your photography? If yes, could you give us a few details on how you work? If not, is there a link between your passion for photography and your day-to-day job?
Natasha: Up until this point I have always been focused on making photography be a part of myself instead of putting it on the side and outside of myself, so most pictures on my website are taken directly from my life and work as a good mood-indicator about my life in the moment the pictures were taken. I should mention that right now I feel I am at a break-through point, because after 5 years I finally feel somewhat finished with documenting ONLY myself and the little bubble around me. So I have new plans now. Greater plans. But they are still kind of secret, and I wont tell you! But keep watching frosk.org this fall, there will be lots of new great things going on!
I have made a living of my photography up until this point, but it is not as glamorous as it sounds. During the latest two years I’ve worked in a modern portrait studio where you take happy family portraits on a white background. The images I’ve taken at work are extremely different from my own pictures, and if you saw one of my images I’ve taken at work you could probably not tell that it was my image. All photographers working at the studio had to produce quite similar, generic pictures to fit into the concept. Working for the portrait studio was quite a stressful job, and you had very little creative freedom. I ended up feeling more like a factory worker than a photographer in the end.
As of this summer I dont work there anymore, and I’ve been lucky enough to get myself a little space in an atelier together with other artists. So this year I can finally become a full time artist as they say! (Haha, I still am not comfortable calling myself an artist and I probably never will!) Now I can finally focus fulltime on my own projects! I almost don’t have words about how much I am looking forward to it!
Pop Experiment: What can you tell us about the region you live in?
Natasha: As I mentioned in the start, for me one of the best things with the Internet is how it binds people together because they have an interest in common, instead of binding people together because of their location. I never had to go public with my various locations before since I haven’t worked outside of the Internet, but now that I’ve gone freelance I might have too! I never meant to hide my location because I wanted to be all mysterious about it, but simply because I liked the idea that people were looking at MY images, but they had to use THEIR mind to find a setting around the images since they knew very little about me and my surroundings. I’ve sometimes had the experience that a few special things are more beautiful when it is untouched and pure. When the image just speaks for itself.
But you have probably figured that I like places with dramatic northern, western, rugged looking nature. My favorite place in the whole wide world would have to be Northern Norway in Scandinavia. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else. With its steep rugged mountains that are reaching directly from the sea directly up into the sky. I felt incredibly in harmony with the rest of the world when I was there. If anybody has the opportunity to travel to Northern Norway they shouldn’t miss out!
Pop Experiment: What can you tell us about your background? Where did you go to school? What did you study? How did you begin? What artists or things have inspired you? Continue to?
Natasha: I bought my first camera at 16 after I made the dreadful discovery that there wasn’t a single image of me from I was 7 or 8 years old and up until the point where I decided to get a camera. I guess the family camera broke at 8, and we never got a new one until I bought myself one. I decided from that point forward that I would try to document as much of my life as possible, and that is how I started to take pictures.
I was pretty blank when I first got the camera, I knew nothing about cameras or their settings, and I just had to try and fail until I got things somewhat right. After I had taken pictures for a couple of years, people started to hire me for freelance work on the side of my drama education. The moment I was done with my drama education I never looked back and haven’t been on a stage since (but that is a whole other story)! I was luckily and very quickly offered a non-glamorous full-time job as a school-photographer, driving around for 13 hours in a car with 80kg of photographic equipment to schools all over the place. But it was a nice stepping stone for me. After working as a school photographer for half a year, I applied for the job at the portrait studio which I got. I probably wouldn’t have gotten it without my experience as a school-photographer, because I am completely autodidact, and don’t have a single hour of formal education in any kind photographic work.
When it comes to inspiring artists, my favorite photographer is Jan Saudek. Even though I look up to him on so many levels, it doesn’t mean I want to create the same type of imagery as him. He manages to turn something that otherwise would seem pornographic into something beautiful. He has always been ahead of his time in so many ways. He is a very unique individual. I was lucky enough to meet him in Prague this summer, and he has an amazing charisma.
