Elizaveta Porodina on intuition, doubt, and Found Dreams

Elizaveta Porodina moves between fashion photography and portraiture, creating images that often feel less like photographs than fragments of a dream. Her pictures are carefully staged and lit, saturated with colour or stripped back to deep black and white. The people in them seem caught in the middle of something—a gesture, a transformation, a story that began before the shutter clicked.

Before photography, Porodina trained in clinical psychology and spent years drawing, illustrating, and working with digital painting. She picked up a camera at 22, bringing with her an instinct for looking beneath the surface. That background still lingers in her work: in the attention she gives to expression and gesture, and in the sense that her portraits are always reaching for something just beyond the visible.

Her clients include Vogue, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Moncler, and Carolina Herrera. She has also worked closely with musicians, including the Irish band Fontaines D.C. or the Viennese band Bilderbuch, creating image campaigns and music videos for them. Her photographs have been exhibited at OstLicht in Vienna and at Fotografiska Stockholm, which presented her first solo exhibition there in 2022. That same year, Hatje Cantz published her first monograph, Un/Masked.

Now comes Found Dreams, her second monograph, published by Prestel on October 6. Edited by Porodina together with Nadine Barth, with a foreword by Ariana Grande, the book brings together 180 colour photographs across 240 pages. It centers on Porodina’s recent fashion work, in which every shoot becomes a small world of its own. Models take on the qualities of mythic figures; light, colour, and composition become emotional forces. The images move between the surreal and the cinematic, while the psychological undercurrent of Porodina’s work remains close to the surface.

Alongside commissioned work, Found Dreams also contains a series that has never been published before. Porodina photographed it two years ago and chose to keep the images unseen until the book. Rather than presenting the series in one place, she threads the photographs through its chapters, allowing them to reappear at different points and turning the book into something closer to a journey than a straightforward collection.

In her recent conversation with hube’s editor-in-chief, Porodina spoke about the long wait that preceded the book, the role of intuition in her creative decisions, and the moment when making new work stopped feeling like a risk.

Sasha Kovaleva: When did Found Dreams first begin to exist in your mind as a book? Was the idea always there in the background, or did you have to look back at your own work before you could recognise the book hiding within it?

Elizaveta Porodina: It was exactly that—the last option you mentioned. The countdown started with the publication of my first monograph, Un/Masked. I’ve made another book since then, a special collaborative project with Carolina Herrera, but I think of it differently because it isn’t a monograph. So for me, Found Dreams began the moment Un/Masked was published. Ever since then, in some way, I’ve been working toward the next monograph.

But working toward it doesn’t mean doing it as fast or as frequently as possible. My respect for the medium of the book is enormous. For me, it’s the apotheosis of the work: the work becomes a physical body, and that body is the book. I respect the medium too much to put out a book simply because I can. The material has to feel like enough.

I wanted to bring the themes I was working with as far as I possibly could. I was going to say “to perfection,” but that’s the wrong word—we’re all human, perfection doesn’t exist, and every statement is by definition imperfect. When people first started asking whether I wanted to make another book, I knew the work was still too raw. I could see the empty spaces very clearly, and I wanted to fill them—with personal projects, commercial commissions, and whatever else might find its way into the work.