Twenty three year old photographer, Laura Zalenga actually studies architecture but spends all her spare time with photography. You can clearly see, that this seems to be her great love and passion. As she tells us ‘Don’t look at me just feel my soul’ is the notion hidden behind her pictures.
Through her pictures the Munic based photographer transfers emotion, tells real-life fairytales and manages to create whole new worlds. Her work mostly consists of self-portraits, she loves the special challenge of doing everything by herself and at the same time sees the whole process as a kind of therapy in which she has the chance to reflect everything stuck in her head. Her pictures seem delicate, yet strong and full of power.
Whether it’s human faces, human bodies in a unique landscape, or the revelation of an unexpected moment, if it expresses a mood, Zalenga is interested. Her favorite kind of photography is all about feeling.
So when Zalenga sets out for the day with her camera, she goes with the flow.“I keep my eyes open for magical spots with unique light where I can tell a story,” she says.
The photo below demonstrates what she means.
“I adore riding trains; it’s one of the places where I come up with most of my concepts,” she says.
One day, she saw this coal hill from her train window and knew she had to shoot there. “I was covered in black dust in the end and the soles of my feet were sore, but I was happy that I dedicated all my energy to this image,” she says.
But Zalenga is hesitant to describe her photographic style. “It’s so hard to try to watch yourself from the outside and objectively say what your work is,” she explains. “What I can say is that my images have a clear visual voice paired with dreamy moods, and that emotions are my language.”
Zalenga is also fascinated by fairy tales. “These stories existed all around me while I was growing up—from the plays we saw and I acted in, to the books I read,” she says. “Within an obviously fictional story, you learn that life isn’t always easy, but you are also invited to dream and to hope. And within these short stories, which remain nearly unchanged for centuries, there are always simple truths and morals to be learned.”
For Zalenga, there are three ways to make a good photograph:
1. “Touch me, move me, make me feel something.”
2. “Let me see something in a new way.”
3. “Make my eyes fall in love—with great composition or color, for example.”
“And sometimes, there are those special images that combine all three elements and take my breath away,” she says.
