A Ukrainian Photography Duo’s Fantastical World

Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova’s story begins far from photography and far from each other. Noven studied automated processing at university; Shcheglova attended a school dedicated to oil and gas research. Noven lived in Lutsk and Shcheglova in Ivano-Frankivsk, cities in Ukraine that are eight hours apart by train. But they both found themselves drawn to art—and then to each other, after meeting in 2008 through a website for photographers. They soon began an artistic collaboration, dubbing themselves Synchrodogs, a name that reflected how they paralleled each other in taste, perception, and thought. (They were also fond of dogs, as storied, reliable companions to humans.)

Starting out, they took a diaristic approach to photographing their own lives, but gradually they embraced the fantastic, shifting toward a highly stylized approach that plays with tropes of futurism, science fiction, and their own idiosyncratic brand of psychedelia. They have set out to beguile audiences with a blend of visual effects, play, and consideration of the body in relationship to the lansdscape. The series Supernatural (2015), shown at Dallas Contemporary in 2015, is the result of a four-thousand-mile drive around the United States; its photographs, made in the sunbaked, arid landscapes of the American Southwest, at times resemble scenes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point.

Another series, Reverie Sleep (2013), delves into the liminal state between being awake and asleep, restaging the contents of the duo’s dreams. The earlier series Ukraina (2011) is more straightforwardly documentary and playfully homes in on the rhythms of daily life. “The project is a visual portrait of [the] country that brought us up,” they write on their website. “Life here has always been slow and calm, people doing ordinary things. . . . The project strives to convey Ukraine’s solitary nature showing the paradox of being in the center of events [but] still isolated, being the biggest European country [but] still somehow forceless concerning its own future.” It is self-evident that recent catastrophic events, following Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, have altered the meaning of these words and images. Ordinary life in Ukraine is now shattered, the country’s future uncertain at best.

Over the years, Synchrodogs has found an international audience through commissions for fashion magazines, such as Dazed and Harper’s Bazaar, and for brands including Kenzo. Last February, the duo was on location for a job abroad when the war in Ukraine plunged the country into chaos, making it impossible for them to return home. Currently in limbo in Central America, they are looking to relocate to the United States, and now spend their days strategizing about how to support relief efforts for the Ukrainian people.

Michael Famighetti: You are in a specific location that you cannot disclose. What kind of photography project were you working on there when the war in Ukraine began?

Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova: We were shooting an advertising campaign, but we can tell no details, as we signed a nondisclosure agreement. Usually, we get contacted by clients that want something interesting, that request an artistic approach; those that do not expect a classic outcome but strive for innovation. It was one of those projects where we could take our time to experiment. Also, a big part of the proceeds from it was donated to help people of Ukraine.

Famighetti: You both now live in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city near Lviv. What was the art and photography scene like there before the war?

Noven and Shcheglova: We can’t divide artistic scene by cities and regions in Ukraine; it is a big country, but the community knows each other and is quite tight, as a lot of artists either move to Kiev or go there from time to time. All artists, musicians, fashion designers, publishers intersect, making for quite multidisciplinary groups of friends. Before the full-scale war, we all used to have what people call “plans”; now we skipped to another kind of life. Day by day, small victory after small victory, we are on our way to freedom and peace. Many artistic people we know (including us) created their own initiatives to support Ukraine or work as volunteers. The part of our life that deals with creating new works is currently suspended, as there are a lot of other important and urgent things to do connected with war and overcoming its consequences. 

Famighetti: Your 2011 series Ukraina has a different poignancy today. What was the original impulse behind this series?

Noven and Shcheglova: Our goal was to make a slightly surrealistic documentary project. Ukraine at that time had a lot of kitsch, especially in villages. The project is raw and sincere, just like the people in every picture. All portraits are accompanied with interesting stories, like a portrait of a naked woman with a painted face whom we found via a newspaper ad that said, “Looking for a friend,” or forty-two-year-old Orlando, who liked dancing on trees, using them for pole dancing. There are also a lot of kids in the series. With all of them, we had a touching first meeting and deep conversations. That was totally another country twelve years ago. Ukraine grew up and became much more cosmopolitan.

Famighetti: There is a quiet sense of theatricality in that series, an element that becomes more pronounced in later series, which are more clearly directed. How do you negotiate constructing artifice in an image while trying to represent what’s before you in the world?

Noven and Shcheglova: We always try to balance between real and surreal, natural and artificial; it is a big part of our recognizable style. We know that documentary photography has some kind of unwritten rules, but we wanted to show soul more than the body, to convey the spirit, vibe, mood of that time more than the actual mundane life. So we broke the rules and made things how we saw them. We have a big archive of photographs of that time, and one day we will make a book out of them.

Famighetti: Your work has also expanded into moving images recently.

Noven and Shcheglova: For the last nine months, we were working on our first short movie, consisting of eleven scenes shot in Ukraine, Norway, France, and Italy. The movie is going to be on the edge of classic theater and opera and innovative technologies, like contemporary digital art, and should show how science and art can harmoniously coexist. We were in the process of shooting when the war started, so we had to freeze it. We really hope we can find funding to resume the film in the future. 

Famighetti: Environmental phenomena and playing with futuristic tropes are currents throughout your work. How did these interests and aesthetic form?

Noven and Shcheglova: Weird and paranormal things have been haunting us since the beginning of Synchrodogs. We have plenty of stories about how we heard UFO sounds in Marfa, Texas, or saw a unicorn in Colorado after a lightning bolt hit the ground right in front of our car during a big storm. Once, we were shooting Tania on Icelandic lava, and it was impossible to stand on the very sharp stones and not get cut, so we put some clothes under Tania’s legs. When we finished, the clothes were gone. After, we scanned the film, and they were also not there in the shots. In the evening, locals asked us if some of our things disappeared, as there are elves living in that district that steal things all the time. In other words, these situations happen—they are part of the process.

Famighetti: Sounds like the universe delivers hallucinatory magic for you, as a third collaborator. Some of your photography is also based on another unpredictable element, dream states.

Noven and Shcheglova: Dreams have a straight connection with our art. Over the years, we developed our own nighttime meditation technique, which deals with catching a subtle moment between wakefulness and sleep. It involves trying to fall asleep and move into non-rapid eye movement sleep, a stage during which some people might experience hypnagogic hallucinations. We usually wake ourselves up in the middle of the night to make a note of what we have just seen, in order to recreate those visions via photography and mixed-media art afterward. That’s how many of our projects begin.

Famighetti: What can the international art and photography community do now to support Ukrainian artists?

Noven and Shcheglova: Many of us are in difficult or unstable life situations, so we appreciate any support. We feel now is the time to concentrate on supporting Ukraine overall. The situation is really difficult, especially for cities that are under Russian siege (like Mariupol, Bucha, Chernigiv, Kharkiv, and many more). People have lost their families, homes; whole cities have been erased by Russian bombs. We made our own charitable initiative where we sell our prints and donate money to urgent causes. We also are selling NFT art now on SuperRare and Foundation, which has helped fund medical operations and refugee evacuation.

Famighetti: How are you staying up to date and getting information on the evolving situation?

Noven and Shcheglova: We don’t only read big newspaper articles; we are subscribed to trusted Telegram and Instagram channels run by small groups of volunteers that are updating news every twenty minutes. A huge amount of information is being processed, and we try to react where help is needed most. For instance, yesterday we helped collect money for a Jeep that was needed, for buying medicine, and to create new homes for refugee families who have lost everything. 

Ukrainians are united as never before, like a big family. There is endless love, pride, and warmth toward one another. We are grateful for the tremendous support of other countries. We radiate gratitude to all the kind people helping us withstand these days. Please keep doing so: address your governments, state your position against the invasion, request a Russian gas embargo, help us by providing air defense systems. This is the battle for our freedom from Russia, which has terrorized us for centuries. We believe our brave people will defeat evil with the help of the democratic world. Truth and justice have to win.