Photographer Natalie Kapushenko studied fine art and design until she turned 20, then she bought her first camera, and began traveling the world. She followed her eye for beauty and explored New York City, Alaska, Hawaii, South Africa, Tonga, France, Switzerland and Bali, where she currently resides. She discovered two main muses: mother nature, especially the element of water, and the human figure during her travels. She combines the two to create her art and the process can be defined as a blend of intention, intuition and magic. The true subject of her photos is often unclear as she captures the union of the human within nature and nature within the human. “My art is a statement that we can find beauty in everything, and that in order to preserve and restore the beauty of our world, we must open our eyes to see things as they are — raw, real and natural. Not how we want to see them — enhanced, skewed, edited.” she states on her blog. In her gallery you can see the captured beauty in its most distilled form: natural light, simple lines, purposeful scaling, minimal editing if any, and a wide range of subjects from humans, oceans, and plants, to wild animals including cheetahs, whales, and bats. She is extremely passionate about the wellbeing of the planet and the health of the oceans and she uses her freediving skills to illuminate the beauty, depth, and power of the sea to inspire conscious consumption and raise environmental awareness. She explains her philosophy for her artwork as follows; “My ideas start from nature and take shape when I add a human into the environment. I may notice the shape of a rock, and see how it mirrors the female figure. I may see an animal in its wild habitat and remember that we were once wild too. I may swim through plastic in the ocean and wonder how it feels to be a fish with trash in its home. My art is a result of my desire to reconnect with the natural world — especially through water, the element we all came from. My art is also a movement — to inspire appreciation and passion for taking care of our planet and ourselves.” She also adds; “In my photographs I strive to activate the imagination and open the eyes of the viewer up to the beauty we often do not see in the world, in humans, in ourselves. I like to take my viewer out of the reality they’re used to experiencing and help them see through a new, feeling lens. For example, the plastic in my photographs represents the impact humans have on the ocean — suffocating, not-meant-to-be-there. A human wrapped up, side by side a sperm whale who is vast, at home and free, shows how we’re all inhabiting & impacting this world together.” Below you can see some of her best visual compositions of people in nature and nature in people.
