Artist Bio
Olga Muranova has been involved in photography since her childhood years. Her first photography experience included shooting black-and-white film photos reflecting her childhood and family life (e. g. the visits to her family’s country house in the vicinity of Saint-Petersburg in Russia, family car trips, hikes and biological expeditions with a few children’s extra-activity clubs in Russia).
Olga’s later color film and especially digital photography experience has mainly included capturing different episodes from her travels, including the landscapes of the visited places, daily life, events (such as concerts, theatrical performances, shows, and art exhibitions), and communication with local people.
Olga’s current interests in the area of photography include travel and nature, "photo-glimpses” of social events, portraits of friends, and looking at people with their pets and other animals.
Sharing Space with Animals
The topic of my Visualizing Care & Repair project is people interacting with animals. Like many other kids around the world, when I was 9-10 years old, I cherished some strong dreams about having a doggy or catty friend. However, my mom’s objections (“You’ll be getting up at 6 or 7 a.m. to walk it the first thing in the morning every day,” “It's going to scratch any lucky furniture around it,” “It's going to smell”) didn’t go well with those sweet dreams.
Fortunately, a few other family members, including my grandmother, my uncle, and my dad, were kind enough to help me set up my first aquariums containing various species of fish, frogs, crabs, insects, and snails. A bit later an army of turtles, tortoises, and hamsters joined our home mini-zoo as well. This helped me get around that initial dog/cat gap.
After starting to take care of some smaller but still very cute animals during my middle/high school years, I started to notice emotional bonds in our everyday interactions with our brothers and sisters from Mother Nature. Interacting with the inhabitants of our home mini-zoo helped me realize even better that sharing our lives with pets and other animals often brings us many positive emotions, including immediate joys and unconditional love.
Visiting a few zoos and public aquariums in different parts of the world as well as watching lots of people with their furry four-legged friends in the later years stimulated me to start paying attention to the fact that our dogs and other pets tend to be acutely attuned to our behavior and emotions. I began to notice that, although dogs are able to understand many of the words we use, they are usually even better at interpreting our tone of voice, body language, gestures, and facial expressions.
After taking a few photos of the people interacting with their pets, animals in nature , and inhabitants of zoos and aquariums, I began to realize that, in many cases, animals can gauge people’s emotional state based on behavior, body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. I observed that a loyal dog will typically look into its owner’s eyes to try to understand what he/she may be thinking and feeling. Many pet owners have told me: interacting with their animal friends has proved a highly effective remedy for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, ease loneliness, encourage exercise and playfulness, and improve their mood and attitude.
The effect of interacting with home pets and their wild(er) counterparts has served as a great creative stimulus. In an environment now full of cell phones and other distractors, I prefer to concentrate on the behavior and emotions of people and animals being around each other, and the state of natural harmony brought by such interaction.