Flower power: Angelina Golt’s best phone picture

“Spontaneity flowing into painstaking planning” is how Angelina Golt describes her artistic process. This image was taken during the Ukrainian photographer’s first shoot in Kyiv, after she relocated from her home in Odessa, on the Black Sea coast.

“The first thing I do is walk around my location, exploring and touching,” Golt says. It was a grey winter day and she wanted to find something fresh and springlike. “It’s hard not to fall in love with a greenhouse like that. I closed my eyes, absorbed the scent of the flowers and asked my surroundings to talk to me.”

With no formal photography education, Golt cites movies, and their cinematographers and directors, as her teachers. Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of The Young Pope, and Oscar-winning Taika Waititi, a New Zealander and the director of Jojo Rabbit, are two of her favourites.

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She treats her models like actors, asking them to embrace their inner feelings as they move and pose for her. Sasha, the model that day, reminded Golt of “fire and water. Plus she has a great sense of humour.” Women, and the female form, often feature in her work, and she finds an “echo of herself” in each of them.

Using an iPhone saves time fiddling with camera settings: “It’s just a tool, like a brush in the hands of an artist.” In post-production, Golt likes to “play the artist” once again, but for this image she simply deepened the colours: “Colour is also a powerful storytelling tool.”