Dana Popa, Not Natasha Review by Rachel Barker

Dana Popa, Not Natasha
Impressions Gallery 05 Feb – 18 April 2010.
Commissioned by Autograph ABP


Dana Popa began Not Natasha in 2006, thirteen years subsequent to ‘the General Assembly of the United Nations [adopting] the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women’ [2009]. Her work often focuses around contemporary social issues with a particular emphasis on human rights. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in 10% of the population’s women and children in Moldova being linked to trafficking. Dana Popa gives the work a clear, clever title, making a stand through her medium that these girls are not Natasha anymore. She aims to capture the girls’ souls, to tell the story of their pasts, their pain.

The work was originally planned for exhibition as book form alone, playing on the size of a passport – the key element of taking the girl’s identity. The size of the book also reflects the diaries the girl’s kept, private and truthful, emphasizing the strong visual narrative of the work. The images were also exhibited in gallery space. At the Impressions Gallery, thirty-seven photographs [a variation of 35mm and 6x7 medium format, printed gloss and mounted beneath glass against white with thick black frames] were exhibited; some images stood alone, whilst others worked as part of a small series. The positioning of the images emphasized the visual punctuation, with white spaces between the images representing the silence between speech. Dana’s images portray a shocking, underground, real world through strong contrast and natural lighting. The quotes accompanying the photographs make the atmosphere of the exhibition disturbingly real, creating an uncomfortable silence throughout.

I chose to concentrate on a series of three images, untitled, the self-harm scarred arm against creased white bed sheets, the girl with the red hair covered with white sheets looking towards the wall and the image of the foot in the stirrup with the hand out of focus coming into shot from the left in the background, the only image of the three not centrally focused. I choose these three images because I immediately appreciated the strong connections between them. The abortion connotations, clinical and orderly; the comparison of skin tone against white linen, white being a strong link throughout several of the images, especially with white lace, sheets and curtains, possibly indicating purification as well as acting as a barrier. Shot 35mm, the images are in keeping with the dimensions of documentary photography, however colour personifies the images, making them all the more real than traditional detached black and white documentary photographs. As a woman, I identify with the fear of each of these women; the images clearly dictate that this, this awful ordeal can in fact happen to anyone.

The image of the scarred arm and the photograph of the girl laid under sheets are both in full focus, whereas the foot in the stirrup image follows a sequence throughout the exhibition, with strong consideration of depth of field, concentrating on the main subject than the object around them. The arm and body show full focus, because everything in those images is to be read equally.

In the book, these images are not shown together as they are exhibited, which questions whether these three images are indeed related. Viewing the images in the exhibition space I presumed the three images were of the same girl, at first prior to abortion, second in the clinic bed recovering, and third, the scarred arm presenting the pain of the girl’s past. Whether or not these images are interconnected or not, they tell powerful narratives through which the pain of these girls, whom no longer feel like strangers, scream from below the glass.


Rachel Barker

Sealy, M. [2009] Beyond the Lens, Foam Magazine, Spring.