It’s 1949. Or 1969. Or 1999. Or 2029. Whatever year it is, the work of Anastasia Mezz feels as if all of time has stopped and is happening at the same time. It carries that anticipation that each last year of a decade holds for what is yet to come, and rekindling all that has been.
Anastasia, 28 years old, was born and raised in Russia and creates her art from her apartment in Moscow. She purchased her Polaroid 636 camera on an online secondhand platform and started shooting in 2021 and has been hooked ever since. In her own words, she uses this medium to express her inner world and artistic journey, although she doesn’t consider herself a photographer but rather an artist who “writes photos on canvas”.
Where most Polaroid photographers consider their work finished once the camera ejects the instant picture, Anastasia’s creative journey starts. Cue to a photograph that reflects a deserted scenery – inviting the viewer to step into somebody else’s world for a brief moment: the view of a lake haunted by an eerie mist, the desolate apartment building with a few dimly lit rooms late at night, that view you get when you look up in the middle of a forest with the whimsical drawings of naked branches against the uninspired white sky. And before you know it, this picture becomes the theatre stage where another moment unfolds right in front of us.
Once emulsified and fully immersed in water, Anastasia quite literally paints a Polaroid lift onto the background. The juxtaposition of her work builds with every brush; each moment demanding its own shape on stage. ‘Although a photo is a frozen image, it is insanely beautiful… the texture the photo ends up with is like a fabric’ as she drapes the initial photograph of solitude with an emulsion, adding companionship to the desolate backgrounds. Often, the emulsion includes silhouettes of people, birds or planes, creating silent but ever-present witnesses.
In most of her works, she emphasizes the juxtaposition by choosing a Polaroid with contrasting colours to the backdrop – creating literal highlights of what matters in that moment, a connection. Yet the final work feels like the lingering cold that is left when the warmth of a connection fades.In other works, she uses minimalistic portraits that read like intrusive thoughts. You see one portrait, and right next to it, another portrait breaks up the initial image, seemingly interrupting the dialogue the viewer has with the first photograph. It challenges the viewer to choose who to focus on, with whom to have a conversation.
Anastasia is convinced that everyone has something to tell, and describes her work conveying the feelings and experiences she has during the process of creation. “Each picture is not just an image, but a story filled with emotions… and on a Polaroid, everything is beautiful, it doesn’t matter what emotion you have.”
In contrast to most Polaroid works on Instagram, her work reaches the audience through reels instead of static posts. Seeing the works being created, the brush bringing the Polaroid lift into position, a couple appears next to a car, or a silhouette takes form inside a room. It reminds us of those moments we’re passing by places where we used to be with former loved ones, figures from our past. The places are still there, and so are the memories, so why aren’t we? What if all of time is happening at the same time, it just happens to be emulsified timelines painted as memories onto current timelines? And so it shows through Anastasia’s works, that she feels things deeply, and has a lot of philosophical thoughts. Posts often include intimate snips of conversations that are part of core memories. Her current oeuvre reads like a diary of interrupted thoughts, which Anastasia calls “instantuality and spontaneity”, where “each picture captures a moment on a Polaroid, which gives them a sense of liveliness, sincerity and “realness”. To the onlooker, it elevates the Polaroid from a static medium to a dancing memory, afloat above another reality – waiting to take its resting place, albeit forever out of place.
Anastasia also includes the tutorials of making her art, eager to spread beauty beyond the emulsions’ corners. But perhaps the best lesson learned from Anastasia is her caption on the 13th of May, 2025, stating “Sometimes life makes us sad, but a Polaroid shot is always a pleasant memory.”