1. What is your name?
Anna Mala.

2. What is your professional practice?
I work as a fashion stylist.

3. What did you make?
Ongoing series of self-portraits and still lives.

4. Why did it need to be made?

As a stylist, I am almost always working as part of a team. As much as I enjoy this, the introvert in me craves solitary creative work. For my personal projects, I tend to work in a scrappy, instinctive way: building props, creating simple sets, styling myself and letting the work evolve rather than following a plan. I use what I have at hand, including my own body, as a prop. Ideas can be realised very quickly and I have full control, which is great.
When my son was small, I was at home with him for the first year and I longed for an outlet for my creativity. I used his nap times or the moments my husband took him outside to quickly build a set and shoot a photo. I was breastfeeding and at the time it felt to me as if the nursing pillow was part of my daily outfits. In one of the photos I wear it around my waist. These works were a way to let that creative energy out and find my way back to myself after becoming a new person as a mother.

5. What does this work give you that your commissioned work doesn’t?

I did two bachelor’s degrees and finished my studies at 29, so for a very long time there was always someone moulding me, looking over my shoulder. When I work on these self-portraits, without a brief or a deadline, I am focused entirely on the image and figure things out alone, on my own terms, outside any system. That feels liberating, it allows me to reach a part of myself that wants to be expressed without refinement or approval.

I also love dancing and for me movement and photography are connected. Working with my body is another way to express myself.

And I feel like I am growing through this work. I used to shoot vertical images all the time, until I realised I was brainwashed by Instagram. Now I force myself to work horizontally, and it is changing the way I look at photography,