About the author
There are not many female photographers out there who also do modelling and have lot of beautiful tattoos on their body. Well, Amsterdam has one and her name is Ira Chernova, a 23 year old engineering student from Russia. I was really interested in her background and her amazing pictures that i decided to set up a meeting to ask her about it. Interesting fact? She wanted to do it at an Irish bar, as she loves Irish people because of their similarities with Russians.
What I really like about Ira’s pictures is the way she captures beautiful parts of a city in her street images, and her strong black and white pictures combined with a “to the point” theme.
Zenit cameras and coming to Amsterdam
Ira started photographing at the age of 18 and studied it by herself. Like a lot of Russian photographers, she started with using a “Zenit camera” back in the day, which was a gift from her father. She came to Amsterdam around 3 years ago while backpacking across Europe and taking “street life” pictures. She found our city really interesting because of its people and how alive it is even though it’s quite small. She’s been living in Amsterdam for quite a while now and mainly still photographing freelance.
Work and inspirations
In her photography, Ira mostly does black and white and takes pictures of people. She told me that she got inspired a lot by Paolo Roversi and Tim Walker because of their signature style of taking pictures. She also reads a lot of magazines such as Vogue Italy to get inspired from. When asked about her ink, she told me that most of the tattoos do not really have a story behind it. Most were just spontaneous and of random stuff.
Last but not least, Ira has some words for young Amsterdam based photographers out there who want to pull it off in photography. She said “There is such a long way in photography, success does not come in an instant. You have to push yourself, keep working and keep getting inspired by seeing other peoples work!”
Check out Ira’s personal blog, Flickr and some of her beautiful work below:
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