DESTINY by Kristina Shakht
Shakht admires them for their natural beauty, a quality that floats across her body of work. One of the defining elements of Shakht’s work is her exploration of the body as both a subject and an object of meaning. Her soft yet quietly commanding style of portraiture addresses the ways the female body is perceived, challenging traditional and often sexualised portrayals by subverting the notion that the women’s place in art is as the ‘muse’.
Her most recent project, Destiny, does just that. As she describes it, the photo essay is about “exploring the raw emotions women are often discouraged from expressing—anger, rage, and sadness—while also embracing playfulness, self-exploration, and boredom.” Shot during a transitional time for both Destiny, the model, and Shakht herself, the series portrays intimate moments of vulnerability and curiosity.
In true Shakht style, Slavic influences are woven through each image like a near-forgotten myth. Shakht's models often embody the Slavic idea of the rusalka or siren-like figure: an ethereal, otherworldly presence.
Destiny holds this tension between softness and severity. Styling within the images was very deliberate. Shakht and Destiny worked together, intentionally matching the underwear, which has a kind of the waviness to it, to match Destiny’s hair. Light plays a crucial role within the styling to evoke this Slavic sensibility. Wrapped in sheer fabrics, Destiny bathes in this very diffused, silvery tone, similar to the way moonlight reflects off dark waters in Slavic fairytales. Her presence is not passive; it is charged, enigmatic, untouchable.
Shakht explained that Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki, was a shared reference for both herself and Destiny.
Like Shakht, Araki sees the world through a lens that does not blink. His work moves between desire and loss, capturing Tokyo’s undercurrents of eroticism, loneliness, and fleeting beauty.
The similarities between Nobuyoshi Araki’s Kinbaku series and Shakht’s photo essay lie not just in their shared exploration of subjection, but in their approach to power, intimacy, and the act of looking itself. Both artists use the bound body as a visual and emotional focal point, creating images that oscillate between vulnerability and strength, submission and agency.
Hair plays a big part in the storytelling of Destiny. Shakht explained that braiding artist Tre’Nae Larez helped shape the narrative with two seven-foot-long braids, further deepening this exploration of identity. Braids, within Destiny, much like in Kinbaku, are not physical restraints but metaphors for emotional entanglement or the complex dynamics of desire.
Kristina’s subversion of the role of the muse is arguably her greatest power as an artist. The pouty lips, porcelain skin and haunting gazes that envelop women in the Pre Raphaelite and Renaissance art of her childhood, Kristina saw through. She’s redefined the gaze and the act of seeing, creating images where the model's autonomy is not only acknowledged but celebrated, in doing so giving voice to the quiet moments that often go unnoticed in the grand narrative of femininity. Moments of introspection, intrigue and contemplation. She acknowledges that these elements are not opposites, but rather coexisting forces that shape the complexity of the female form and experience.
