Natasha Navasardian is an artist and photographer based in New York. She has a strong background in design, which makes her art practice unique and interesting. It often helps her to create cinematic, intimate images that explore identity, human connection, and the beauty in everyday environments. Some of Navasardian’s series contain what we would call a balance of composition with intuition. Furthermore, her street photography series, based on New York landscapes, will be reviewed.
Going through the images produced for the New York series, it can be said that the artist tends to work in the aesthetics of motion pictures. Such creative ideas are not new; for example, Cindy Sherman’s series The Complete Untitled Film Stills is a series of self-portraits in which the renowned photographer created a film reality that never existed. However, a person in Navasardian’s visual narration is usually not the focal point. She uses human bodies as if they were some sort of props that demonstrate the triumph of the man-made world over nature. New York City is her preferred setting, not only due to the artist’s location there. The Big Apple can be understood as a centre of the universe in what may be called “new mythology”. This way, all those massive interiors that Navasardian pictures transform into some sort of sacred spaces for the chosen ones, as if it were a sci-fi movie.
Her use of lighting – often natural, filtered through urban structures – adds a layer of tenderness and melancholy, reinforcing the sense that these spaces are inhabited not just physically but emotionally. The architecture becomes a container for memory, possibility, and isolation, framing the figures not as protagonists but as fleeting presences, almost ghosts within the city’s immensity.
Navasardian’s color palette and framing choices often evoke a dreamlike detachment, allowing the viewer to oscillate between recognition and unfamiliarity. Her photographs, though rooted in realism, carry an aura of fiction, as if we are witnessing moments from a narrative withheld from us. This ambiguity invites deeper contemplation about who we are within the environments we construct, and how these very environments begin to shape our identities.
Ultimately, Natasha Navasardian’s New York series is a new reading of what an urban landscape should look like. A metropolis environment filled with habitats. Such works allow viewers to look at their city from a new angle, which is the greatest compliment to the artist’s creativity.
