Synchrodogs: If Lucid Dreams Were Captured
Synchro for togetherness. Dogs for human’s wild companion. Synchrodogs. A Ukrainian duo of photographers, Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova, who met on the internet in 2008 and haven’t stopped creating since.
Born in 1984 and 1989 respectively, they did not have any formal artistic training but instead one pursued an education in automotive and robotics while the other studied records management. Their photographic practice started out as a curiosity, but they soon realised they shared the same artistic vision and decided to explore their artistic and conceptual senses further.
Their surreal and eerie work was featured in various magazines, including but not limited to Numéro, Purple, and Jalouse. Their other-worldly approach to advertising was widely recognised, with their commissions and commercial work including Burberry, Marni, and Shiseido among others. Lately, the couple was invited by Louis Vuitton to publish a book in the series ‘Fashion Eye’, spotlighting Ukraine through fashion photography.
Synchrodogs’ imagery is populated by nature and dreams. The couple describes themselves as nature-lovers who would always choose a motorbike ride across endless fields over video games in a stuffy apartment.
When planning a few of their series like Supernatural or Reverie Sleep, the couple practiced meditation exercises before going to sleep, leading them to lucid dreaming. Their images are thus quite literally lifted from dreamscapes: their visions were re-staged to be photographed. The result is an ensemble of bizarre pictures, supernatural imagery, and unusual poses.
The link to psychoanalysis is evident. Like surrealists and Dada artists before them, Synchrodogs explore dreams as portals to our subconscious and the subtle space between being conscious and not.
Synchrodogs claims that “dreams have a deeper meaning than simple sequences of images randomly produced by our minds”. Instead, they think dreams possess a certain psychoanalytic potential. According to them, dreams are not only sources of inspiration, but they are also energy-giving. Tania recalls a dream she had on a shoot, one where her late grandfather hugged her. She woke up feeling his love, care, and strength that she needed to recharge her creative batteries.
Well aware of humankind’s disastrous behaviour towards its environment, they use their art to convey a message of urgency and a need for change. In Slightly Altered, Synchrodogs explored the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountain Range, documenting their 1-month long trip along the way. The resulting shots depict the many harms inflicted by humans on the woods that have raised, nourished, and sheltered them.
The installations photographed were created with the certainty that they will only be temporary, inevitably altered by the next passers-by or by nature following its course. In this series, Synchrodogs’ signature, nudes, remind us of our fragility and vulnerability, stressing that our relationship to our surroundings needs healing.
The project titled Ukraina tells the tale of a war-ridden and economically crushed Ukraine. The shots depict a static life, one where time and customs are torn between the modern Occident and a Post-Soviet Union era. The ordinary people pictured seem to show the isolation and helplessness of a country whose future is being decided by others. Personifications of their country, the subjects are simultaneously hidden and targeted. In fact, Ukraine is one of the biggest countries on the continent but was still secluded up until recently, before Russia’s invasion put the word Ukraine on everyone’s lips.
After 2014, the country and its citizens were brutally and suddenly deprived of a sense of security. This emptiness, isolation, and staticity can be read in the series of photographs, as if people froze when the war started 8 years ago. But the pictures also show a dream, one of independence, creative freedom, and self-determination.
One can postulate that there are two edges to Synchrodogs’ work.
The first and most obvious is the crushing and squashing of the human. Bodies are fragmented, shrouded, or practically buried under dirt, rocks, and sand. This could illustrate a return to our roots, our primitivity, being sent back to nature if the shots did not seem to picture such a struggle. The subjects often seem to be suffocating, gasping for air. The models’ poses are tangled, tense, and tormented.
In the midst of this chaos, we can note a desire to dream, to marvel, to escape. The second side of Synchrodogs’ work is one of elevation. In many of their photographs, there is something that’s left to flicker, to shine, sometimes even blindingly. Bodies are almost weightless, as if they are levitating. The subject finally seems to be in harmony with its surroundings, a beautiful and delicate communion between man and nature.
These two aspects however paradoxical seem to coexist rather than be mutually exclusive. A certain tension is palpable. Above all, we can find a drive to make it out of here, to succeed, and this in spite of obstacles, difficulties or hardships linked to our origins and upbringings (this is particularly true for the series with Misha Koptev in the ghetto of Lugansk). There is a certain beauty in humankind’s fragility, vulnerability, and struggle. Through Synchrodogs’ work, we clearly realise how grand and majestic nature is and how insignificant we as a species are in comparison.
