Listening to Taisiia felt truly unique, especially because she speaks from a place that is undoubtedly real. Her perspective goes beyond the image itself I'd say, into insecurity & self-perception, probably the parts of ourselves we usually keep private.
And somehow, there was something very sincere about it, maybe because a large part of the internet is, basically, people playing different versions of themselves, and here it felt like someone was trying to understand themselves through what they create.
I think that’s what stuck with me the most: how close we can feel to someone whose images don’t resemble ours, simply because the questions behind them are the same.
That’s about it, I think.
Here is our conversation:
a: What’s the most “you” image you’ve ever posted?
Taisiia: For a long time, I’ve been involved in producing and styling photoshoots, and I’ve always done it purely guided by my soul and heart. For a long stretch, I ran an active feminist blog, and every post I made was carefully thought through. My shoots and my content always reflected my inner state, what I was going through, a certain period or stage of my life. I had a lot of photo work and articles dedicated to specific feminist themes — from sexual objectification to gender stereotypes.
I eventually left that blog and moved over to this one. There was a phase when I tried to force myself into certain frames to fit trends. I wanted to make trendy content because it seemed like that was what you were supposed to do. I tried boxing myself in, making trendy content, jumping on trendy cores and all of that, but I quickly realized it just wasn’t me. It doesn’t appeal to me at all. It actually unsettles me even more and brings up negative emotions.
So I came back to what I actually love. I try to live through my emotions via movement, through dance. I discovered contemporary a few years ago. I can’t really dance, but the contemporary direction means a lot to me, and I just decided to make the kind of content I’m making now. I’m not trying to squeeze it out of myself. I create only when I’m inspired, by intuition. If I take on a brand collaboration, it’s only something I’m genuinely interested in, something I can weave into my image, my life, my blog, my vision. Something I’ll actually be able to live through.
From recent work, the one that probably reflects me best is one of the older shoots. It’s a post from March 8th, where I’m standing and showing off my muscles, my bicep. It’s not exactly mockery, but a kind of play with the stereotypical posts and posters from a time when men were portrayed as super strong, masculine, muscular, cool, badass. It’s a kind of reworking of gender stereotypes. The shoot is also done in red tones, which adds a bit of tension and conveys a sense of pressure both from within and from outside — pressure tied to the existence of an enormous number of gender stereotypes and the patriarchal construct as a whole.
And the other one — this is a recent shoot of mine, posted on my birthday, May 18th. I try to catch all these ideas quickly, write them down, and bring them to life as soon as they come to me. It’s a shoot in black and white, where I’m wearing a voluminous, massive draped dress. It’s a portrait. I very rarely do super portrait-style photos or show my face. I’m trying to do it more now. And I’m wearing a handmade neck piece made of black feathers. In the main shot, a black feather covers one of my eyes. I’m dressed entirely in white, and it’s a kind of reference to a phrase. It’s like a double meaning. It’s not the main idea, but it runs through it. It’s just a small thread connecting to that thought, because I’ve always felt like the odd one out.
The truth is, that whole birthday shoot was meant to come with a huge accompanying text that I wrote but never posted. About how this month, because of certain events, I went through a very difficult state of realizing, accepting certain parts of myself, and understanding that I’ve lived my whole life with a sense of my own insufficiency, of being somehow worthless, as if I’m always not enough, as if I’m always bad. And that’s my inner trauma of deficient narcissism speaking. In a way, it’s actually the engine driving all of this. That feeling of never being enough, and the constant comparison to other people. There’s an inner critic inside me that compares me to everyone around, and I never win in that comparison. And this shot points us a little toward that phrase — the odd one out, the one who stands out. She seems beautiful and unique, but in her own head she feels like nobody, worthless, insufficient. Something like that.
a: What version of yourself are you in right now, creatively?
Taisiia: Honestly, I never considered myself a creative person. I’m fairly grounded, extremely realistic, strict. I’m a marketer. Not the kind of marketer who handles content — I’m the kind who handles the numbers, the analytics, the strategy, the one who runs departments. But at this point I’ve come to understand that throughout my entire childhood and adolescence, people essentially tried to suppress any creative impulse in me, any creative spark. It was an enormous amount of comparison and criticism. That’s where a certain trauma inside me grew from, one I’ve been working through in therapy for a long time now.
As I mentioned earlier, every piece of content I make — if you can even call it creativity — is in one way or another tied to a specific period of my life. I’ve never forced content out of myself. I don’t like that approach. I don’t shoot content for the sake of content. For me, content is a way to express feelings, emotions, experiences, to make something. I’m not claiming that I’m inventing something new or anything like that. I just do it the way I feel, without trying to please everyone. I simply make what I like.
And right now is probably a kind of period of an internal crisis, of intense feelings, because in the near future I’m planning to release the second part of the shoot. It will be a shibari shoot, where my movements are completely restricted, and everything I relied on was taken away. My eyes were tied, my hands, my legs, my whole body. I couldn’t be responsible for my own movements — I was literally being moved by the shibari artist, the rigger. She moved me. I’ve wanted to do a shoot like this for a long time, but it never quite resonated with my inner state. And now it’s lined up — everything came together — my inner state, this feeling of being bound, of fear, of a certain anxiety, met my desire to create this shoot. And now, personally, I see in it an intersection of the inner and the outer.
a: What does a day in your life look like?
Taisiia: Since blogging isn’t my job or my profession — though, to be honest, it takes an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources, both mental and emotional and financial and physical. It demands a huge investment of everything. Maybe it’s just like that for me. And what helps me navigate it is that I only do it the way I feel, when I feel like it, when I want to, out of genuine desire, from the soul. Not from “I have to,” not out of necessity, not out of need, but out of genuine desire — I do all of this because I want to. I’m a workaholic. I work as a marketer for several brands. I run influencer marketing and PR departments across several brands. I work specifically with influencers, media, PR, collaborations, and special projects. Each brand has a different number of people on the team, so my day is basically an American Psycho kind of day.
I get up very early, usually at 6 a.m. I go to the gym and do an hour and a half to two hours of strength training. I’m a real gym rat. Then comes a maximally healthy breakfast. I’m obsessed with clean eating. I’m constantly making myself protein desserts. I eat, and then I start working. I often have a lot of meetings, and honestly, I’m genuinely happy when I don’t have any work meetings, because then I can actually get more work done. It’s an enormous amount of content approvals, revisions, writing strategies, testing hypotheses. A lot of work.
a: Whose way of thinking has influenced you the most lately?
Taisiia: It’s a surprising thing, because I work a lot and have been working for a long time with various influencers, creators, content authors. I consume an enormous amount of content and very rarely sit on social media myself. I genuinely love galleries and art and museums. I really like Matisse, I like Kandinsky. I don’t watch that many films and shows, though I probably should watch more.
Right now I’m genuinely in awe — I’ve discovered the art of photography. I’m absolutely drawn to all the subject matter that sits on the border between a kind of eroticism, sexuality, and the ordinary, familiar life we live. Because I think it takes great labor and skill to make sexuality not vulgar, not aggressive — to make provocation beautiful, erotic, but without sleaze, without lust, without cheapness. That’s difficult.
I’m absolutely in love with the work of Nobuyoshi Araki. I really like Ren Hang, the Chinese photographer. I love their work. I love the films of Dario Argento and Luca Guadagnino. I really like old Alexander McQueen. I love Martin Margiela — what he did in the earlier years. I love Ann Demeulemeester, I love Jean Paul Gaultier, specifically the old archive collections.
But I can honestly say I draw inspiration from everywhere. I absolutely love nature, I’m inspired by nature. I like certain architects. I really love Tadao Ando. I have a thing for a certain Asian aesthetic. I like all kinds of different things. Sometimes they don’t necessarily match, they don’t connect to each other, but that’s how it is.
Often ideas appear on their own. I’m absolutely fascinated by the exploration of female sexuality and the possibility of showing it in different ways. I love the theme of female domination. Dominance, too — that’s also really interesting. I like looking at all of these themes through the lens of feminism. I love looking through old magazines, I love revisiting and reworking the themes of how men and women are represented.
Studying archives, looking through old magazines, old advertising — how things were depicted, what the representation looked like, how the world has changed. I find watching all of that really interesting. Either way, all of my creative work, as I see it — all my content — passes through some kind of feminist lens, a feminist prism.
a: Is there such thing as bad taste?
Taisiia: I can’t say that I believe bad taste exists. I think everyone has their own vision. But for me, here, it’s a little bit about formulations, about how things are perceived. I consider very few things to be art. I consider very few things to be creativity or talent. I think only a small number of people are truly talented. I can’t bring myself to call myself talented or creative. Just as I can’t say that my own work is art. I just do what I like, and that’s it. I’m not waiting for recognition from it. I’m not expecting anything from it. I do it the way I feel.
Sometimes it’s funny to me to see when people just completely copy something. It’s wonderful when you’re inspired by something, you rework it, you pass it through your own vision, through your own experience, through your own life, through your own prism, and you show it. Then it’s really not just copying — then it’s something of your own. But when you just literally take and steal someone else’s work and call it art, that’s strange to me. To me it feels wrong and unfair. But then again, everyone has their own vision. So I think everyone has the right to do what they want.