Swamp Kikimora

How are we increasingly impacted by our own echo chambers in the modern world? Your cozy swamp. Your own world, where everything is according to your rules. Only your principles, values, and interests. Only you are always right, and you are the measure of vice and virtue. Information that isn’t annoying. Events that don’t throw you off balance. Peace of mind and no worries. And the less the wind of change penetrates from outside, the calmer the water in this swamp, the stranger its inhabitants….

The first picture introduces us to an extravagant, but not devoid of renewed taste and original grace, an eccentric hermit, an inhabitant of the swamp. She is completely uncomplicated about her location and with an instructive iconographic gesture, she broadcasts only her truth about the world. The symbol of her special status is a reed.

In the second picture, our friend, the Swamp Saint, draws knowledge about the world of people from the book of the Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who dissected human characters in his outstanding plays and stories. Our heroine, like Chekhov, does not like people, preferring to learn about them at a distance, staying in her quiet swamp. Living life, with its passions, joys and sorrows, unexpected changes, seems interesting to our Kikimora only on the pages of the book, but in reality it is better to sit and not twitch anywhere, and let reeds sprout from the boots.

Loneliness bores even the most hardened introverts and the soul requires attention; the personality climbs out to do something that will arouse interest in it from the environment (which is not). Our Kikimora puts itself in a picture frame, presenting an unwritten masterpiece of its own greatness. The reeds rustle, applauding.

Filled with satisfaction from her own importance, having accumulated considerable book wisdom and having been in all its glory on the canvas of a painting, the Kikimora dances graceful steps, squishing her feet in the swamp slush. Frogs that have jumped out of the water croak rhythmically and wait for the end of the ballet show.

The self-absorbed dance is interrupted — a sherman from the opposite side of the pond tactfully questioned the appropriateness of dancing in the reeds during his shing attempts. Pursing her lips, the lady of the swamp launched an attack on the intruder who had dared to reprimand her and encroach on her supremacy and order in this small world surrounded by reeds.

Jordan Andrew was born on August 28, 1976 and lives in the city of Goryachy Klyuch in the Krasnodar region of the Russian Federation. After 20 years of working as an office lawyer, having a good legal career and a stable income, he decided not to “rape the soul of an unloved profession,” left the office and opened his own photography studio.