Not a Metaphor: An Interview with Alisa Resnik

Photographer Alisa Resnik

Alisa Resnik’s (b. 1976, Russia) gloomy photos of dark interiors, people in bars and streets at night, have received a lot of attention recently. Her series One Another won the 2013 European Publisher’s Award for Photography, and as a result was published simultaneously by the five publishers supporting the award. On Christmas Eve, Resnik made time to speak with GUP about loneliness, looking for the light in the dark and how that is not a metaphor.

Your photographic work takes place mostly at night in restaurants and bars, but you also work as a waitress. Do these two occupations influence each other?

When you are a waiter, you are an observer. It’s interesting to look at people. Just to see how a person moves: how does the person order, how does the person eat, how does the person relate to the waiter? People don’t know that you are an observer, they’re eating and drinking, they’re just relaxing. They don’t know that there’s somebody who’s looking at them in a phenomenological way! (Laughs) I’ve learned a lot about people while working as a waitress, and I use it in my photography.

 

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