Arina Starykh

Image from “Surfaces sensibles” project by Arina Starykh

Biography

Website: www.arinastarykh.com

Arina Starykh (Moscow, 1996) began her photographic journey in the field of fashion. She soon felt the need to move beyond the conventional aesthetic frameworks of fashion imagery to explore more intimate, narrative and plastic forms. In 2022, she joined ENSP in Arles, driven by a desire to establish herself on the French artistic scene. During her studies, she developed a practice situated at the crossroads of contemporary photography and visual arts. Today, Arina develops a photographic approach rooted in intimacy, exploring the memory of the body, relationships, and the materiality of things as silent narratives.

The project

I am drawn to what is fragile, almost imperceptible: those things we don’t always notice, yet that speak. Folds, textures, crumpled or worn materials become fragments of narrative. Simple gestures, delicate presences, strong enough to catch the eye.

In my images, the body is present but never central. It converses with the world, sometimes blending into it. It, too, becomes a sensitive surface, a territory of emotions and memory. I try to capture that precise moment of emergence, of crystallization — not the event itself, but its trace.

My work takes the form of an intimate archaeology: I explore the marks left by time, by contact, by absence. I make these materials speak, to see what stories they might reveal; each time, I discover new details, signs of life and the passage of time.

Imperfection is not a flaw, but a language. A way of existing. My photography slips into those imperfections, those silences, those fissures and those folds.

Image from “Surfaces sensibles” project by Arina Starykh

Image from “Surfaces sensibles” project by Arina Starykh