ARTIST BIO

 

Annina Tonkov is an analogue photographer with a focus on nude photography and a preference for black and white film.  She was born in Berlin, Germany and raised biculturally by her native mom and a Bulgarian father. After exploring arts, specifically photography in high school, she became interested in psychology, which became the profession she mastered officially. However, shortly after starting her bachelor's programme in the Netherlands, international connections and a certain enthusiasm for shared expressions of social taboos influenced her to explore nudity with photography. For a long time she would only discover the theme with friends in a safe environment and when the conditions seemed to be little resistant. Only in 2022, when she started to gain more media representation, she started a journey working with a broader diversity of people. As her clients realise, that she embodies photographer and psychologist, she finds a bigger purpose behind her work: She can not only promise aesthetically fine content, but also a shared journey towards a more acceptance of her clients’ own naked body.

ARTIST STATEMENT

 

My art is always a representation of my own journey, a long searched tool to vent, to express deep struggles and desires that sometimes cannot be properly described in words. I almost exclusively work with analogue photography, my mission is the non-sexualised depiction of nudity.

 

I grew up in an environment where nudity was normal and I found a world in which especially female nudity is tabooed and sexualised at the same time. Knowing and experiencing the harmful effects of that paradox situation, I came to enjoy my photos’ effects more and more on me, and  my models. I realised that my art was political. And I decided to use that power not only for decoupling sex from nudity, but also for showing more diverse bodies and for the confrontation with everyone’s own body. You can find aesthetics in my art, intimacy, states of mind, or you may find a process of healing by reaching better acceptance of who you are.

 

The analogue way of working speaks to me, because it offers the possibility to slow down, think, appreciate and be excited for every photo I shot. As a millennial and in the rapid way we live in a capitalist and digitalised society, this shape of art provides me a momentum to breathe.