"Purgatory: Longing" Photograph - Limited Edition of 20

Aleksandra Kotova
Surrealist · Conceptual Nude Photographer · 3D Visual Artist


I grew up in Dnipro — a city where I spent years unable to locate myself among the people around me. I followed social scripts that never fit, moved through a world that felt simultaneously aggressive and indifferent. What saved me was not people, but nature. From the age of eleven, I understood that the natural world was the only space where I felt loved without condition, protected without performance.

That early refuge never left me. It became the ground on which all my work stands.


Since childhood I have lived with extraordinarily vivid, physically felt, lucid dreams — interrupted at times by the paralysis of sleep and the visions that come with it. When I described what I saw, people were surprised. I am still uncertain whether this is a neurological characteristic or simply the signature of a sensitive soul. What I know is this: surrealism, for me, is not a style. It is the more honest reality. I lost my grip on physical objects as anchors long ago. The interior world — its symbols, its logic, its terror and its beauty — is more substantial to me than its outer reflection.

This is why I do not consider myself a photographer. I use the camera the way a painter uses a brush — as an instrument to make visible what already exists inside.



My work began, almost accidentally, the day I turned the camera toward someone who had been photographing me. The resulting image won an international award. In that moment I understood what I was looking for: the places where the forms of the human body and the forms of nature become indistinguishable. Where a shoulder echoes a hillside. Where skin carries the same logic as bark or stone.

The model present in nature is not a figure placed into a landscape. She is a continuation of it. And into that naturalness I want to inscribe the full surreality that nature itself sometimes reveals — seismic, inexplicable, magical. For me, the forest is not mysterious. It is perfectly logical. I am trying to show that logic.


My inner world is the source material. The grey tones, the dreamlike spaces, the figures that appear between presence and disappearance — these are not aesthetic choices. They are records. Every image is built from my own textures, my own light, my own library of sensation accumulated over decades.