ONGOING STUDIES

"Ongoing Studies" is a long-term portrait series by Oxana Guryanova, focused on exploring human identity, perception, and presence. Guryanova photographs different people — at different times, in different countries, under changing conditions. What unites these portraits is not a consistent visual style, but a particular way of seeing. She is not searching for resemblance — she is searching for resonance. For something unspoken, felt rather than seen.
Identity, in her view, is not something you can capture once. It shifts. It hides. It often escapes.
In this project, Guryanova seeks the subtle moments of dissonance — the tremble, the blur, the layered presence. She attempts to catch what exists between being and appearing, between the real and the perceived.
Each portrait is a fragment of visual research — a quiet observation of a person in a transitional state. These images are not meant to explain — they are meant to ask:
How does a person change when they become an image?
Can presence be recorded without being fixed?
And where does the self end, and the representation begin?
Ongoing Studies is not a collection of faces. It is a visual archive of emotional states, a diary of encounters. A project about attention, uncertainty, and the act of seeing — one that remains open and evolving.
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