When Tanya Fishmann looks at one photograph from Phoenix today, she notices an almost colourless eye. She now reads it as a future that has not yet taken shape. That meaning was not consciously planned when she made the image in 2022. It arrived later, through the experience of returning to it.
The distinction matters throughout her work. A ritual takes place; photographs preserve some of its traces; the person looking at those photographs continues to change. In this conversation, Tanya describes how self-portraiture brings those different moments together without making them the same thing.
A body inside the work
Tanya’s interests in art, mythology and experiences beyond rational explanation began in childhood. Over time, those interests came together in her artistic practice. She sees a connection between performance and the symbolic actions of ritual, and wanted to experience that process herself.
Using her own body as both subject and instrument made self-portraiture a natural part of the work. Photography was already her favourite medium. She describes ritual and art as expressions of a connected process, rather than separate activities she decided to combine.
Making Phoenix in 2022
Tanya connects Phoenix to the upheaval she experienced after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In her account, she left Kyiv, where she had lived all her life, moved between several places and eventually settled in Lviv. She remembers arriving with little beyond her analogue cameras and a few ritual artefacts.
She wanted a way to reflect on what had happened to her. The phoenix became a meaningful image through which to approach a performative act of rebirth. The work was intended as something to experience through bodily action, rather than only a visual representation of change.
Phoenix consists of digital self-portraits created during a ritual performance. The analogue cameras in her recollection belong to the circumstances of her move; they should not be taken as the medium of this particular series.
The ritual and the photograph do different things
For Tanya, the performance is already a complete artistic act. The photographs emerge from the ritual as its visible traces, while leaving the inner experience outside the frame.
She describes personal changes that continue beyond the performance. Her account of ritual’s therapeutic potential belongs to her experience and interpretation of the work. The photographs offer a different point of access: a gesture, a face, a fragment of fabric, or an image that can later be read in another way.
During the ritual, she tries to step away from conscious control of the picture. That distance can produce visual possibilities she would not have arrived at through deliberate composition. Only afterwards does she look at the photographs as an artist making a selection.
Selection without rearranging time
Costume helps Tanya enter the state she needs for the performance. She works intuitively with available materials and objects. Gestures and poses are not planned in advance; movement follows what she is experiencing.
The camera is used spontaneously. She describes moving between angles and repeatedly releasing the shutter without checking the results. Editing happens later, often on a different day, when she can look at the pictures with a different kind of attention.
“Their chronological order is always preserved because it reflects the actual progression of the ritual.”
She chooses which images remain, but never changes their order. This gives the sequence a specific responsibility: it must retain the progression of what happened. A more visually convenient arrangement would change that relationship to the performance.
An eye seen differently
The photograph Tanya chose to discuss is a close view of her face, with a hand and dark fabric edged in red. One pale eye holds her attention now. She associates it with an undefined future, open to possibilities she could not yet name in 2022.
At the time, she made the image intuitively. Looking again, she recognises both the uncertainty of that period and the possibility of shaping what follows. The photograph has remained; her interpretation has developed.
Returning to a largely unpublished archive
Self-portraiture continued to play an important role in Tanya’s artistic practice following Phoenix. She is now revisiting photographs made in 2022–2023, a largely unpublished body of work she calls Nigredo. While some individual photographs have been exhibited, the archive as a whole has not yet been publicly presented.
She uses the alchemical terms Nigredo and Albedo to describe her own process of reconsidering that period. In her interpretation, moving towards Albedo means integrating what mattered in the experience while gradually releasing its destructive elements. It is not a rejection of the earlier work.
The archive gives her a place to look again from the present. Revisiting it is itself part of how her practice changes.
Leaving a meaning open
Tanya cites Carl Jung’s ideas about symbols and archetypes as an influence. Yet she does not want those ideas, or her own account, to become an instruction for how someone else must understand the photographs.
She is interested in the possibility that an image can evoke something personal before a viewer can explain why. Her interpretation of the eye is one entry into the work. Another viewer may find something else.
Her process offers two questions for anyone returning to an older photograph: what was happening when it was made, and what has changed in the person looking at it now? Those questions can coexist without requiring a single final answer.
Questions about Phoenix and self-portraiture
What is Phoenix by Tanya Fishmann?
Phoenix is a 2022 series of digital self-portraits created during a ritual performance. Tanya describes the photographs as traces of an artistic act complete in itself.
How does she arrange the photographs?
She selects images after the performance while preserving their original chronological order. She does not rearrange the sequence.
Why does returning to an archive matter in her practice?
Time allows her to recognise meanings she did not consciously assign when making the images. Her current reading of the eye in Phoenix is one example.
Explore more on Tanya Fishmann’s website. For another conversation about images whose meaning changes over time, read Alejandra Quintana — The Photograph Stays, We Change.
Based on Tanya Fishmann’s written interview and her Phoenix project presentation for Developing Stories. Interview and editing: Emiliano Vittoriosi / Berlin Photo Studio. Photographs: Tanya Fishmann, Phoenix (2022).
