Alina Saranti
Los Angeles, USA
ARTIST BIO
Alina Saranti is a Greek photographic artist currently living in Los Angeles, having also lived in the UK and Turkey. Her work begins autobiographically and explores the synergies and tensions between text and image, the physical alteration of the photographic print, as well as themes of motherhood, place, our inner and outer landscapes, the personal and political.
After a ten-year career in journalism in Athens and London, writing mainly about international politics, she has shifted her focus to telling stories through photographic projects. Saranti received a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, an MSc in International Relations from London School of Economics, and an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (Distinction).
Saranti has won Director’s Prize at the Griffin Museum’s Annual Juried Members Exhibition, Honorable Mention at the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and at the Los Angeles Center of Photography’s Annual Members Exhibition. She has exhibited in galleries and museums in Athens, Barcelona, New York and Boston. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, Opt West, Aesthetica Magazine, Source, Black River Magazine, Global Zoo Zine, and the Imagined Landscape Journal.
PROJECT STATEMENT
In my project “Far From” I want to make visible what landscape photography can look like for a female photographer with child rearing responsibilities. I combine landscape photographs of the American West with embroidery to challenge the masculinity of traditional landscape photography and the myth of the West. Landscape photography was traditionally dominated by male photographers, as it was deemed unsafe and impractical for women who were constrained to the domestic sphere, close to their housekeeping and child rearing duties. The myths of the American West, its rugged, open, wild landscape have also been closely associated with macho masculinity, the idea of the independent, tough man, ready to draw on his weapon, to conquer the land. Embroidery, on the other hand, has been traditionally labelled as women’s work. It has been seen as something that women can do within the safety of the home, keeping them out of harm’s way and out of trouble, compatible with their domestic duties. Landscape photography was deemed too far, too dangerous, too incompatible with being a woman.
Things have changed and landscape photography is open to female photographers now. Or is it? I made the black and white landscape photographs used in this project at the fringes of family trips. I embroidered them in the safety of my home, between school drops offs and pickups, kids’ illnesses, and school holidays, often with children in the same room. I am drawing on the history of embroidery as both a symbol of female submission and a weapon of resistance for women, and overlaying that to the masculinity of landscape photography and the American West. Stitching usually has to do with mending or embellishing; my marks are the feminine overlaying the masculine, they are imposing on it, cracking it open, splitting it apart, growing into it.
