©Iveta Lazdina, Beyond, from Silver Birches

This week we are featuring projects seen at the Medium Photo Portfolio Reviews.

Using nature as a tool for healing is a powerful endeavor. It was been proven that spending time in the forest induces a state of physiologic relaxation and as one researcher discovered, “after spending time in the forest, people often exhibit changes in the blood that are associated with protection against cancer, better immunity and lower blood pressure.” Photographer Iveta Lazdina understands this phenomenon, as her work not only gives her a personal connection to the natural world (and the urban world), but she manages to move her discoveries into a state that is emotional and transformative. The work is painterly and layered, bringing a new way of seeing into being.

Iveta Lazdina is a fine art photographer from Latvia. Her interest in photography began through travels when she became drawn to embedding personal moments that can move beyond the medium’s ability to reproduce reality.

Inspired by impressionism, she works in an abstract and semi-abstract manner using creative multi-exposure technics. She studied at the Photo Academie in Riga (Latvia). In addition, Iveta has attended several creative classes and international workshops.

Lazdinas’s images have been exhibited in several international group exhibitions and published in magazines including: ICMPhoto Magazine, LeMag, and Dodho.

Follow Iveta Lazdina: @yvettaphoto

©Iveta Lazdina, Eternity, from Silver Birches

Silver Birches

Photography, for me, is an inner conversation – how to balance my inner turmoil of thoughts and emotions. Growing up, I was raised in circumstances dominated by unwritten rules that excluded me from sharing personal thoughts and experiences with others. My work figuratively represents the duality of emotions experienced during that time, including the loneliness, solitude, pain, and my yearning to be free from the darkness that ensued. The balance of duality in nature and surrounding – light and darkness, happiness and pain, symmetry and chaos, offers order in disorder and carries beyond surface value. For years I have been learning to accept them in my life.

The close embrace is a visual meditation that explores a grove of Silver Birches I frequent on daily walks near my home. Each image symbolically reflects my struggle to find balance amidst the turmoil of thoughts and emotions that arise when the forest’s silence takes over.

©Iveta Lazdina, Look Over, from Silver Birches

©Iveta Lazdina, Small Pleasures, from Silver Birches

©Iveta Lazdina, Together, from Silver Birches

©Iveta Lazdina, Two sides, from Silver Birches

Urban Conversations offers a unique perspective on city life, highlighting the moments of beauty that often go unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of daily life.

Despite intense, ongoing geopolitical and environmental changes, moments of tranquility and awe can emerge when one takes a moment to observe intricate patterns and colors amongst city streets.

This series, which conveys the impressions that emerged from the magnificence of the unseen, is my reflection on these intensive processes around me. Yet, simultaneously, I am looking to stop even for a short to appreciate the beauty of a brief now moment.

©Iveta Lazdina, Close by side, from Urban Conversations

©Iveta Lazdina, Futurism, from Urban Conversations

©Iveta Lazdina, Loveliness, from Urban Conversations

©Iveta Lazdina, Map of Structures, from Urban Conversations

©Iveta Lazdina, Patterns of thoughts, from Urban Conversations

©Iveta Lazdina, Resonsiveness, from Urban Conversations