Born in Latvia, raised and educated in Moscow and presently living and working as a visual artist in Florida, Irina is attracted to the challenges of different subject matters from the exploration of the physiological challenges of portraiture to the complex political and social consequences of regime change in Post Communist Russia or an attempt to probe the sensibility and techniques of pictorial aesthetics at the turn of the 20th century.
In an age when contemporary photography is epitomized by the huge color images produced by such artists as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Jeff Wall, Irina Dakhnovskaia-Lawton has reverted to a style of photography that is the polar opposite. Instead of the outsized, gargantuan print she returns to the intimate, hand-held print. Instead of the microscopic specificity of larger than life-size detail, she returns to Pictorialism with its broad, moody swatches of chiaroscuro. Instead of the Diasec mounted glossiness of much recent work, she returns to the glorious, muted monochrome tones of the photogravure.
