Between Documentary and Quietly Horny

Everyone finds their niche eventually. Some photographers settle into landscape, some into portraiture, some into the particular arrangement of morning light on a kitchen table. Kristina Podobed, from Odessa, found hers somewhere between art photography and what you might generously call extreme candidness: she photographs women urinating outdoors.

She hasn’t been arrested for this, which places her in a more exclusive category than you’d think. The images are mostly outdoor—women in fields, forests, on roadsides, squatting in the unselfconscious way that happens when you’ve been walking a long time and there’s no other option—and the photographs hover in that space between documentary and quietly erotic, which is not an unusual place for photography to live when the subject is women and the photographer has strong opinions about framing.

What I keep coming back to is the question of collaboration. Is she directing these shots? Catching candid moments? Somewhere between the two? There’s a matter-of-fact relationship with the body in her work that reads as a particular Eastern European outdoor pragmatism, which shifts the register considerably. The same photographs made in a controlled studio context would feel like something else entirely. Location does heavy lifting in photography. Context determines whether something is art, documentation, or a criminal matter—and sometimes all three simultaneously.

I don’t know what category to put Podobed in. Fetish photographer seems reductive. Documentary photographer seems generous. Somewhere between those two labels is a woman with a camera and a very specific interest she’s managed to turn into a coherent body of work—which is, honestly, more than most people achieve with their passions.