INTRODUCTION
In her haunting landscapes and abstract compositions, Nadezda Nikolova draws on early photographic modes to create images inspired by the natural world that feel not backward-looking, but wholly original and outside time. Trained first as a scientist, Nikolova is attuned to the ravages of climate crisis and exploitation, but her art also reflects consciousness of the earth’s billions of years before our arrival and the resilience of nature if it is allowed to heal. Nikolova moves among scales, rendering awe-inspiring geological forms as well as the invisible energies pulsing in waves around and through us. Empty of human figures, the land appears at rest in rich blacks, silvers, and sepias, though human impact may be inferred from the suggestions of smoke, fog, and embers, and of oil tankers dotting otherwise tranquil bodies of water. In a process that she has described as an extension of her spiritual practice, Nikolova engages with a landscape through repeated engagement and deep, meditative observation, before beginning to dream of a composition. In the darkroom, weeks or months of preparation culminate in a few crucial minutes that birth a work individual and unrepeatable, which when successful reveals “a third element, the intuitive aspect, grace . . . that seeks to express through the work,” as Nikolova explained over an email correspondence in May 2025, in which she discussed her life and the evolution of her art practice.
Some of Nikolova’s reverence for the natural world has grown out of a family history marked by displacement and tragedy, in which any sense of home felt elusive. Following World War II, her Croatian maternal grandparents were imprisoned in a forced labor camp. Nikolova was born in 1978 in what is now Serbia but was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During her childhood, the country descended into economic collapse and ethnic conflict, and when she was seven years old, her family fled to Austria, with the hope of being granted political asylum in the United States and living in California, where one of Nadezda’s aunts had settled decades earlier. Austria provided comparative safety, but Eastern European refugees were not always warmly welcomed. By 1991, the breakup of Yugoslavia had escalated into multiple civil wars. The family’s dream of asylum in the U.S. was disappointed, but Nadezda was able to travel solo to San Diego as an exchange student, graduating from high school there. Afterward, she followed a friend to Lexington, Kentucky, for college, enrolling at the University of Kentucky.
Nikolova fell in love with the town, with its extravagant natural beauty and vibrant cultural offerings, but she did not know at the time that Lexington was an important site for experimental photography in the United States, or even that this art form would become central to her life. In the mid-twentieth century, the Lexington Camera Club fostered the creative efforts of serious amateurs alongside avant-garde luminaries such as Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and drew the interest of Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry. Since then, the city has remained a home for innovative photographers. The art school at University of Kentucky offered courses in a variety of alternative photographic modes, including antiquarian methods, reflecting a growing interest among photographers in historic processes. Although Nikolova majored in natural resources and environmental science, she’d always loved drawing, painting, and photography, so she took art classes when she could, discovering an unexpected passion for the physicality and rigor of nineteenth-century photography. She was inspired by Sally Mann’s lush, emotive wet-plate collodion photographs of the American South, which invoked the legacy of the Civil War. After a master’s degree in policy analysis and administration, Nikolova worked for a nonprofit focused on alleviating poverty, but when the grant supporting her job ran out, she saw it as an opportunity to try dedicating herself wholly to art. Lexington’s photography community, which included members of the original Camera Club, offered encouragement and support to the young artist as she discovered her own distinctive practice.
Today, Nikolova primarily uses a cameraless version of the wet-plate collodion process, which was a major breakthrough in photography in the 1850s. Collodion—a thick solution of nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol—is mixed with salts, typically bromide and iodide, and spread evenly over a glass plate, which the photographer bathes in silver nitrate, sensitizing it to light. A nineteenth-century photographer would then load the prepared plate into his or her camera, protecting it from the light by a dark slide to be pulled away after the shot was ready. (For a clear image, subjects had to remain motionless for around ten seconds.) Immediately afterward, photographers would race to develop and fix their images in the few minutes before the emulsion dried. The medium’s challenges were often made visible in blotches where the plate was not evenly coated, shadowy rivulets where liquid chemicals had flowed, and dark patches in corners where the photographer held a plate while developing it. The process can be used to make a direct positive image, often on metal or glass, as Nikolova does, or a negative on glass for printing, which offered sharper prints in greater quantities than previous techniques allowed. Popular for portraiture, wet-plate collodion photography was used extensively during the Civil War to document the human toll of battle, most famously by Matthew Brady, but its heyday proved short-lived, since in the 1870s, the advent of gelatin dry plates allowed much shorter exposure times and freed photographers from immediately developing their images and thus from the cumbersome portable darkrooms required when working outside the studio.
Before view cameras became widely available, Victorian scientists had used cameraless photography to document biological phenomena, applying chemicals to make paper or another medium light-sensitive and placing a specimen directly on it before exposing it to light. Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions became the first photographically illustrated published book in 1843, featuring the distinctive white silhouettes on blue backgrounds produced by the cyanotype process. In the early twentieth century, modernists rediscovered and expanded upon cameraless approaches to break away from the hyperrealism that had become conventionally associated with lens-based photography and create striking abstract compositions. More recently, Alison Rossiter’s silver gelatin photograms on expired photo paper provided important inspiration for Nadezda Nikolova’s process.
Nikolova’s cameraless compositions begin with time cultivating deep awareness of a landscape, in what she calls “a search for meaning through sustained attention.” She creates multiple sketches and works out ideas before moving into the darkroom, where every movement must be quick and deliberate. There, she applies wet-collodion chemistry to black engraving-aluminum panels, and uses light, cut or torn paper, brush strokes, and other techniques to realize her vision. Each piece involves multiple exposures, as many as twenty or thirty, but all must be completed within about three minutes. Despite her extensive preparation, the interaction of all these elements involves chance and surprise, providing a sense of mystery Nikolova finds thrilling, “a space between chaos and control.” The finished panels are intimate in scale, ranging from 4×5 inches to a maximum size of 8×10, the dimensions of her silver nitrate box. “Because I work with the visual syntax of paper masks and gestural elements and artifacts, the need for speed and technical maneuvering of the various elements precludes working with larger panels,” she says. Some works combine multiple panels into a larger whole.
Much of Nikolova’s best-known work, including her Elemental Forms, Landscapes series, was created after her move to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015. California had long represented a dream of respite for her family, and its natural beauty sparked her imagination, but by then the region was also threatened by wildfires and pollution, phenomena that she at times alludes to in striking scenes. While Nikolova has often drawn inspiration from Northern California’s vistas and from artistic forebears who have documented them, her landscapes are not necessarily “about” that specific place. Rather, they are transformed to the point that they may be mountains and valleys from memory, dreams, or visions. Nikolova reflects that in her art she may have been searching for the home she’d never known. “When I first started making the abstract landscape photograms, I understood that, at least in part, the work had something to do with transcending the feeling of never having had a motherland,” she says. “That the work was in fact about feeling a sense of belonging in the landscape; that the landscape had the capacity to receive me beyond my identity: beyond the idea of my history, gender, ethnicity, profession, etc. I didn’t want the work to be about trauma or victimhood, or my personal story. I would like the work to be experienced as a meditation, a prayer even, in the spirit of devotional, anonymous art.”
This yearning is powerfully expressed in Nikolova’s Mother Earth (She Flows, She Is), a sixteen-panel work that the artist began after a visit to Antelope Canyon in Arizona and spent months sketching and conceptualizing. Reminiscent of some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstracted depictions of the Southwest, but in Nikolova’s characteristic black and sepia tones, Mother Earth suggests both the literal lines of the canyon’s strata, rock formations, and rivers, and associations with “heart, seed, womb, fruit,” as Nikolova says. With her previous, ongoing Elemental Forms, Landscape Rearticulated series, Nikolova deconstructed landscapes, reimagining them into novel arrangements, a practice extended in Mother Earth. This large-scale work also echoes her Immanent Forms, Waves series, which invoke the energies manifested in sound waves and waves visible on water, “waves as vibration, as resonance, as amplitude, as octaves, as sound, as music that brings the manifest world into being.” Nikolova’s multi-panel works are part of a shift to more explicitly sculptural compositions, which she sees as a logical evolution when working with physical materials. “It feels intuitive to create groupings of various sizes, to offset the panels, or stack them, and even cut and glue them together,” she explains.
The evocative beauty of the resulting works has won Nikolova an international audience. Her art has been featured in solo exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, and France, and her pieces are held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others. Publications from Analog Forever to Arab News to the Washington Post have highlighted her work. In 2023 Nazraeli Press, in collaboration with the HackelBury Fine Art gallery in London, published a book of her Elemental Forms images.
Along with a fulfilling artistic career, Nadezda Nikolova has also found an unexpected reconciliation with her family’s homeland. In January 2024, Nikolova relocated to Croatia, where she lives on the Adriatic coast in an area where her family vacationed during her childhood. From her terrace and on her daily walks, she can see the island where they stayed, a lovely, rugged place with griffin vultures nesting on its cliffs. She never expected to live in the former Yugoslavia again. This homecoming inspired a series of works titled Meditations on an Island, which return to the site in shifting variations. “My experience has confirmed time and again that there are no coincidences in life,” Nikolova says of her winding trajectory. And while many of the landscapes that she has loved bear scars of environmental exploitation and displacement of humans and other species, she also has hope for the earth’s regeneration, prayers she offers in the form of her sublime photographic renderings.
C. J. Bartunek
Images © 2025 Nadezda Nikolova. All works are unique wet-plate collodion.
