Elmira Katasova on Polaroid Self-Portraits and the Body as a Living Archive
A former lawyer from Ukraine, now based in Portugal, Elmira Katasova turns the camera on herself to ask what a body keeps when everything else changes.
In short: Elmira Katasova is a Ukrainian visual artist who works mainly with Polaroid self-portraits. She left a legal career in 2010, came to photography in 2020 and found her artistic language during the full-scale war, when she had to leave Ukraine with her two children. In this interview she talks about the body as an archive that rewrites itself, why Polaroid “behaves like a body”, how open calls and photographic communities built her exhibition path, and why the confidence people see in her work did not come first.
“My body is an archive of vanished things.” The line opens Elmira Katasova’s own website, and it is the best way into her work. Her photographs are self-portraits, but they are not about likeness. They are about what a body carries: countries, homes, roles, people who are gone, versions of herself that no longer exist.
“The body is the only thing that stays with us all our life,” she says. “And the only thing that never stays the same.”
From law to the lens
Katasova was born in 1983 in Ukraine. She graduated in law in 2005 and worked in the legal field until 2010. Photography came a decade later, in 2020; self-portraiture became the centre of her practice in 2023, and she later developed it through studies at MYPH Art School.
She does not see the legal years as a detour. “Law taught me not to rush to conclusions,” she says. “To look at one question from different sides, to doubt, to keep asking until it becomes clear what stands behind it.”
In art I do the same, only with more freedom. Here you can question even what seems obvious. Who said it is obvious? Acceptable? That this is how people are supposed to think and speak?
That freedom, she adds, needs discipline. If something genuinely interests her, she returns to it again and again, doubting and starting over. “I think that persistence stayed with me from legal practice. And the habit of asking questions not only of others, but of myself — and trying to answer them honestly.”
A reflection in a shop window
Asked when she became an artist, Katasova begins with a paradox: it started when she lost faith in photography.
When the full-scale war began and she was forced to leave Ukraine, photography seemed pointless. “I couldn’t be where events were happening, document the war, help those who needed it. I was responsible for two children and had to think first of all about how to keep living. Photography couldn’t feed anyone, heal anyone or give anyone back a lost home. At least that is how it seemed to me then.” Personal crises followed, and life had to start again from scratch.
The way back was unplanned. On her daily route to work she took out her phone and photographed whatever caught her eye. Then she began to notice her own reflection — in shop windows, in glass, on every surface. “I saw myself everywhere I looked.” Photographing those reflections put her inside the image.
My mind kept telling me there was no point in photography. But as soon as I started shooting, the process itself filled me like an empty vessel — with life, with energy.
There was no single moment of becoming an artist, she says. She photographed, tried things, explored, and never stopped to ask whether she was an artist or not. “At some point I looked back, saw how much I had already made, and understood it was time to show it to others. That is probably when I first began to see myself as an artist.”
An archive that rewrites itself
For Katasova, the archive is not a storeroom of memories. “We change countries, cities, homes. We meet and lose people, live through different roles. And the body goes through all of it with us: it ages, changes its shape and sensitivity, keeps the traces of what we have lived.”
What fascinates her is what the body can do — how it adapts and responds. “Especially the female body, which manages to become several different bodies in one lifetime.”
So for me it is not just a store of memories. It is a living archive that rewrites itself under the influence of what it lives through. An archive of things that are no longer there: time, versions of me, people, states, feelings, emotions. And my photographs are an attempt to claim a moment before it disappears.
She explores the female body through her own because that is where she has something to say. “I am interested in how many different women can exist in one woman. Society likes to sort us onto shelves: here is the mother, the wife, the daughter, the friend, the colleague, the neighbour.” Each role comes with expectations of how a woman should look and behave. Her self-portraits push against that — “to be different, contradictory, inconvenient for other people’s expectations.” She admits she likes to provoke and to leave questions open, “without needing to explain or justify anything.”
Confidence came later
People often tell her she photographs herself nude because she has a “perfect” body, or because she is fearless — some assume she has posed for cameras all her life. “It is not like that at all,” she says.
She never thought of her body as special and had her own insecurities. She grew up in a family where the body and sexuality were close to taboo. Her first nude photograph came at the end of 2022, as an assignment on a commercial photography course led by Roman Pashkovskyi. She had enrolled to become a successful commercial photographer, not to make self-portraits. “It was Roman who encouraged me to continue and was the first to support me in this direction. Before that I had never worked as a model and had no experience of posing or working with the nude body.”
Through self-portraits she slowly began to see her body differently, and to feel brave enough to show the work.
Behind the confidence people see in my self-portraits is a path that did not begin with confidence at all.
Why Polaroid
Self-portraiture, Katasova says, is a particular kind of freedom. “I am the director, the performer and the viewer at once. And my model is always at hand.” She calls each self-portrait “a small performance.”
She rarely plans a frame in advance. Work usually starts with a sudden idea that will not leave her alone; then come space, composition and light. In a private, safe space she works alone with a tripod and self-timer. When a pose is complex or the distance is large, she asks a friend to stand in so she can see the composition from outside, then steps into the frame herself.
Polaroid, as she puts it on her website, does not let her lie. “It doesn’t let me endlessly perfect the image, change the colours or fix what didn’t work. It doesn’t embellish the body, the emotion or the way I look. I either get the result or I don’t. And I like that risk.”
For me Polaroid is almost a living organism. Its image depends on light, temperature, time, chemistry and chance. Even if you repeat the same frame, you practically cannot get an identical result. In this I see a lot in common with the human body. Polaroid doesn’t just depict the body — to some extent, it behaves like a body.
She controls the idea, her movement, the light and the composition. The film takes part of that control away. “In return I get unpredictability, the freedom to experiment and the chance to be surprised. That is its magic for me.”
Between Machines
In 2026 Katasova began working more with architecture and space, exploring how the body interacts with interiors and outdoor environments. She had long been looking for abandoned places. Then a friend found one on a walk: “Elmira, you’ll love it there! You can’t even imagine!”
She expected an ordinary abandoned house. Instead the grounds were full of old washing machines, a car, a boat, sunbeds and countless other discarded objects. “It was a real explosion of imagination. I felt like a small child who had landed in a place where anything is possible and didn’t know where to run first.”
That is how Between Machines appeared. I saw two washing machines, spontaneously stepped between them, and everything came together: symmetry, composition, the position of the body. None of it was planned. At some point the space and the body simply found a common language.
What she keeps returning to
Street photography has always inspired her. “I learned a lot on the street myself, and it still teaches me.” She is drawn to pictures where light, shadow and geometry are the real protagonists, and to the photographer’s ability to catch the moment when they align.
The artists she returns to are Francesca Woodman, Nobuyoshi Araki, Ren Hang, Ana Mendieta, Bill Brandt, André Kertész, Josef Sudek and Masao Yamamoto, with a special place for the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida. Among contemporary Ukrainian artists she singles out Artem Humilevskyi, whose conceptual self-portraits she calls a kind of idol for her. She also looks at minimalism and sculpture, especially Rodin.
What I value most in art is when a work isn’t exhausted by one look.
Open calls, curators and community
In three years her work has been shown in Brooklyn, Paris, Tokyo, Kyiv, Budapest, Lisbon and Cardiff, among other places. How? “In different ways.” She follows open calls closely and applies to those that genuinely interest her — the concept and curatorial approach matter more than the geography. Curators also find her and invite her.
Some moments stand out. In 2025 she dreamed of exhibiting in Japan; when she passed the curatorial selection for Ephemere Photo Fest in Tokyo, one of her works joined the exhibition and another of her photo projects was presented in a separate publication devoted entirely to her work. The French magazine Corridor Éléphant, which she also reached through an open call, published an interview with her and 13 of her self-portraits. “You never know for sure where the next application will lead,” she says. Readers looking for their own entry points can start with our guide to photography open calls.
No single award changed everything, but one story still makes her smile. In 2023, when most of her self-portraits were still digital and had not been shown outside the internet, she submitted them to the Budapest International Foto Awards and received an Honorable Mention. A colleague joked: “That’s it, now you’re officially an artist! See, you don’t just shoot nudes!” “For some reason those words stayed with me. That was probably the first time I allowed myself to take what I do a little more seriously.”
What brings people to her work today? Instagram, which she has used the longest, works — “although I don’t worry much about algorithms or promotion strategies.” Around her, a wide circle has grown, mostly from the photographic world: after every course, exhibition or professional meeting, people stay in touch, follow each other’s work and introduce new contacts. She joined Artfinder, Saatchi Art and Subjektiv only recently, so it is too early to judge them. “Right now what works best for me are professional communities, personal connections and exhibitions. Instagram helps keep those connections alive.”
She treats online work playfully, as another space for experiments, and resists judging everything by whether it “works”. “Sometimes it seems an idea gave no result, and later it turns out it did — just not as fast and not quite as I expected.” When she stops doing something, it is usually because it stopped interesting her.
Advice: follow what you care about
Her first piece of advice to artists starting out is to find what genuinely moves them and keep working on it, whether or not the theme is popular. She was told more than once to do “normal” photoshoots instead of photographing herself nude, how to design her page and what to post. “I felt it wasn’t mine. I wanted to make art. And today I am very glad I followed my own interest, even when it didn’t match marketing advice, social-media algorithms or someone’s idea of what I should be doing.”
It is important to listen to others, but not to become dependent on their approval. And above all, to take your own art seriously.
She also advises experimenting, studying, finding your communities and overcoming shyness. Early on she printed her nude self-portraits and brought them to professional meetings to show people whose opinion mattered to her. For work abroad, her practical tip is at least basic English — enough to talk about your work. “Regardless of the country, people value sincerity and naturalness. You don’t need to pretend to be someone else to be taken seriously.”
The real self, not a perfect one
New digital ways to show and collect work are new territory for her, and she approaches them as she approaches everything else: with curiosity. The materiality of Polaroid, the print as an object, remains essential, “but that doesn’t mean I want to limit myself to familiar ways of presenting art.”
Asked what authenticity means when any body can be generated by AI, she answers without hesitation. A self-portrait, for her, is never just an image of a body; behind it stands her own story and experience. Authenticity lies in presence: of a specific person, her unique body, her lived experience.
I don’t need to create a perfect version of myself. I’m interested in working with the real me.
She still has a large archive that has never been shown, works that are “waiting for their time — and maybe their space.” She hopes they will one day sound together in a solo exhibition.
See more of Elmira Katasova’s work on her website, on her Digital Original website and on Instagram at @elmira.katasova. For another photographer’s take on memory and the image, read our interview with Julia Wimmerlin.
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