Kristina Shakht’s New Photo Essay is About Feeling A Lot
Photography & Creative Direction: Kristina Shakht | Model: Skylar Mitchell | Hair: Tre'Nae Larez | Ph. Assistant: Kokie Childers
I shot this photo essay in collaboration with my friend Skylar Mitchell. The project is titled Feeling a Lot. It was photographed between February and June 2024 and draws inspiration from Slavic fairy tales and nature in the American South. The storyline is fragmented and fever-dream-like, focusing on color, texture, and the emotions they evoke.
A lot of my personal work is created with friends or people I feel close to. I’ve been exploring longer-form conceptual photo essays for a couple of years now, and this is my third one. The entire story was shot in parks and gardens across NYC, from the beginning to the end of the blooming season. I wanted the images to feel so rich and colorful they’d become a visual metaphor for feeling intensely. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of emotions and our frequent inability to name or notice them. I wanted to create visuals that do exactly that—serve as a form of emotional description. There’s a person in the images, of course, and that adds another layer to the idea of feeling—how it can manifest and look.
Shooting the project over several months allowed us to return to it repeatedly and photograph Skylar in different emotional states and moments of her life.
“ It was freeing to center her and her emotions, knowing we had these richly textural backdrops to support and strengthen the visuals.”
During that time, I was also preparing to see my family for the first time in five years since immigrating. I think this project became a way for both me and Skylar to ground ourselves and get through a specific chapter—though we didn’t fully realize it at the time. I treat the process of making art as a kind of therapy, and most of my personal work starts from that place. We shot our final session the day before I flew to Turkey to reunite with my family.
“It felt like closing a chapter before stepping into the unknown.”
At the time, I was also coming to terms with the reality that I likely wouldn’t be able to return safely to Russia for decades. Even though I was living in a safe place, on the other side of the world, that knowledge was a constant undercurrent—and this project became a mental anchor.
The nature of the project was collaborative, but I had a clear vision when it came to creative direction—styling, locations, and a specific hair silhouette. The hair was done by artist Tre’Nae Larez, who I also recently collaborated with on Destiny, another personal project published with Office
