Somewhere to Swim

Sigmund Freud wrote that “the uncanny arouses dread and creeping horror”. That dread is largely caused by something once familiar becoming changed in an immeasurable way. See: a childhood home with someone else’s furniture. Or seeing your grandmother without her glasses for the first time. Or maybe a blue tiled swimming pool. Just like the one we visited on our holidays. Except, empty. Desolate. Void. Photographer Anna Dobrovolskaya-Mints confronts this phenomenon in her provocative study, ‘Somewhere to Swim’. By eliminating people from her photographs, her unnerving images tell the story of a life once lived, quick forgotten. She points her lens at the vacant public spaces and exposes the breach in familiarity. Her photographs force the viewer to reckon with the very thing humans work tirelessly to avoid; that the world exists without us.