Olga Prudka is a Ukrainian photographer who currently lives in New York City. Her style infuses modern explorations of space, movement, emotion and psychology with a candid, timeless romance that captivates viewers and engages them in a conversation about being.
After graduating from the Kiev Academy of Fine Arts in 2007, Olga went on to pursue a degree in graphic design at the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, where she earned her bachelor's in 2010. She worked as a graphic designer for 12 years, during which time she also engaged in an intensive, self-directed study of her true passion, photography.
Olga Prudka, 2023
Olga's craft inherited as much from her intuitive, perceptive nature as it did from her academic and professional experiences. Her education in drawing, painting, linocut, and etching transformed into the almost tactile grain of her filters. And the concise visual communication she perfected as a graphic designer informed the compact messaging of her compositions.
Olga's bold yet balanced work soon garnered the attention of fashion brands, actors, and models. She opened her freelance photography business in 2021, and has since been traveling between Europe and the U.S. to fulfill commissions from artists, companies, and other clients.
At the same time, she has been developing her own artistic oeuvre, which explores topics such as mental health, womanhood, and social justice. She does this by creating safe spaces for her subjects — mostly women — to express themselves vulnerably and in the nude during photoshoots.
Above everything, Olga aims to inspire self love, awareness, and empathy with her photos. She has interwoven a devotion to truth with a passion for addressing social issues to produce images that promote both reflective contemplation and activism.
Featured Projects
SINGULARITY
A whole is not the sum of its parts. And parts don’t forfeit their identities when producing a whole. This dual nature of the shared female experience — the fact that women are at once complete, discrete human beings and united in their womanhood — is the theme of “SINGULARITY”.
CULTURE OF FREEDOM
By capturing an instant of movement, artist Olga Prudka immortalizes motion as dynamic stillness. And by manipulating the perspective of her shots, she imbues this perpetual moment with political significance.
LAYERS
On the couch, the woman’s body is a symphony of curves and layers, a celebration of feminine beauty captured by Olga’s lens in black and white.
DESIRES
Here, Sun. I made you a gift. It’s in your likeness. Not much, I know, but then: Remember the differences in our significance, the orders of magnitude I lack in size.
BLACK WATER
From where you stand, everything seems fine. But what you don’t see is how the world looks to her: the brackish water she’s trapped in, too deep for standing, so wide, there’s no shore in sight. You’re not aware of her suffering, and this sends her further out to sea.
