Anastasia Ivanova occupies a peculiar position in contemporary photography: a Moscow-born artist whose most significant body of work exists not as standalone prints but as a visual architecture for other artists’ sonic and poetic explorations. Her decade-long collaboration with Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith – encompassing the CORRESPONDENCES trilogy of albums, multiple film commissions, and a major Centre Pompidou exhibition – has established her as one of the most technically accomplished Directors of Photography working in the experimental music and performance space. Yet her independent photographic practice, spanning editorial commissions from Vogue to Vice and her evocative Freshness series, reveals an artist whose vision extends far beyond documentation.
From Moscow to the Centre Pompidou
Ivanova built her early career in Moscow as photographer and retoucher, with magazine commissions ranging from Vogue to Vice. This versatility attracted Soundwalk Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki, who recruited her as Director of Photography for the Collective’s CORRESPONDENCES project – a collaboration with Patti Smith spanning more than a decade and traversing geographies from Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara to Ethiopia’s Abyssinian valley.
The CORRESPONDENCES project, first exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in February 2023, combined field recordings, two-channel video installations, sculptural elements, and Smith’s incantatory spoken-word performances. Ivanova served as Director of Photography across multiple segments. Her contribution to The Knowledge of the Self – a film featuring Anoushka Shankar – involved both cinematography and editing, while her footage formed the visual foundation for La Maison De Rimbaud, set to Philip Glass’s piano composition. The exhibition also incorporated appropriated footage from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, requiring Ivanova to work with archival material of varying quality and aspect ratio.
The Perfect Vision Triptych
Ivanova’s most concentrated period of collaboration coincided with Perfect Vision, a triptych of albums inspired by three French poets: Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and René Daumal. Killer Road (2016) documented Nico’s footsteps through Mexico. Mummer Love (2019), featuring Philip Glass, Mulatu Astatke, and the Sufi Group of Sheikh Ibrahim, traced Rimbaud’s journey to Harar, Ethiopia. PERADAM (2020) extended the project to India’s Himalayan summit, incorporating Anoushka Shankar and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
The technical demands – capturing ambient soundscapes across extreme environments while maintaining visual coherence for projected installations – required a cinematographer comfortable with both documentary and experimental registers. The 2023 Centre Pompidou presentation brought these elements together in a site-specific installation occupying multiple rooms.
Editorial Precision and the Freshness Series
Alongside her collaborative work, Ivanova has maintained an independent editorial practice characterised by technical precision and thematic ambition. Her Freshness series, completed in 2022, examined the ethical and psychological dimensions of vegetarianism through a sequence of carefully staged photographs. The images deploy surreal compositions – food presented in contexts that disrupt habitual consumption patterns – to interrogate the gap between dietary choice and moral conviction. The series earned Ivanova the <a href=”https://creativitys.uk/creativitys-prize-january-2023/”>Creativity’s Prize in January 2023</a>, with the judging panel citing its capacity to provoke reflection on “the often overlooked ethical and moral implications of our food choices.”
Her editorial work, spanning fashion, beauty, and documentary photography, demonstrates a consistent command of lighting and composition. Critics have noted the dreamlike quality that pervades even her more conventional assignments – an atmosphere achieved through deliberate manipulation of colour temperature, shallow depth of field, and the strategic use of natural light. This stylistic signature connects her commercial and fine-art practices, creating a body of work that resists easy categorisation.
Recognition and Representation
Ivanova was named winner of the Seven Arts Contest 2023 and has been a finalist in several competitions, including 50 Contemporary Artists Asia. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Kurimanzutto gallery in New York – the latter hosting the first commercial presentation of CORRESPONDENCES elements in early 2025. A new iteration of the project will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo in 2026.
She is represented by Hay Hill Gallery. Beyond photography, Ivanova is a published writer, with essays on photography, art, and relationships – a dimension of her practice that informs the conceptual rigour of her visual work.
What distinguishes Ivanova is not merely technical proficiency – though her command of lighting, composition, and colour is exceptional – but the intellectual framework within which she operates. Her work consistently probes the boundaries between documentation and creation, between serving another artist’s vision and asserting her own. In an era when photography is increasingly fragmented into specialisations, Ivanova’s practice demonstrates that the most compelling work often emerges at the intersections: between still and moving image, between individual and collaborative creation, between the editorial assignment and the philosophical inquiry. Her trajectory offers a compelling case study in how collaborative practice reshapes the possibilities of the photographic medium.
