Nikita Vendel
My name is Nikita Vendel, a Russian-born artist residing in Canada for the last 10 years. For the first 20 years of my life I couldn't see myself as an artist, had no ideas. But then suddenly I realized that whenever I take pictures with my film camera it makes me feel something. It was weird since I never really tried to be a photographer, never tried to snap a good, correct photo. For the most part I am embracing the idea of randomness. For the most part I come up with a shooting technique that might distort the image and then picture the result in my head but thankfully it is rarely close to what I expected. The main goal for me is to transform an emotion into something that is more tangible than what we experience inside. As I used to say, if I grab a rock and tell you its qualities, you can imagine how it feels in your hands based on experience. But only as soon as I give it to you it is possible to actually feel its qualities as they are for that rock. Same thing with photography: each image is my interpretation of a given emotion and an attempt to find a way how to convey how it actually feels through the process of encoding/decoding with film
