Igor Menaker

Photography is, or can be, a way of life. Photography for me is an expression of my imagination, my personal reality. When I create a photograph I am not capturing an objective reality and I am not sure if it even exists. What I try to communicate with my photography is a highly personal creative vision. Alfred Stieglitz once said that an artist is trying to express his inner world by using objects from the outside world as symbols. It is not what you capture that matters, it is how you interpret it that matters and that elevates a snapshot to a work of art.

My images tell a story. They speak about me, my values, my hopes, my ambitions, and ultimately what I deem worthy of your energy and attention. It reveals, intentionally or not, what I really think about the world around me. Hopefully, my body of work will become a standing testament to my existence on this speck of rock orbiting the sun. As Arthur Schopenhauer famously proclaimed: “the world is my representation”. And it is my life’s journey.

As for technical aspects of my photography, I use Nikon cameras but frankly it does not matter what you use, but how you use it. I employ a special photographic technique called multi-row panorama. Each image is a combination of about a hundred shots in a grid layout stitched together. It takes me about an hour on location to make a single image and then about a week to post-process it in a digital darkroom. That allows me to achieve extreme detail in my images far surpassing resolution of 8×10 view camera. It also works well with correcting perspective distortion and 360 degrees panoramas. All prints are handmade in my studio using archival materials and methods.


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Grayslake, IL 60030