Louis Vuitton, Prada, Saint Laurent — Natalya Urmanova spent fifteen years heading retail direction for these giants of the fashion industry in Dubai and the Middle East. Opening stores across the region, attending fashion shows in Paris and Milan, her life was a constant movement. Two passions held her in fashion for so long: love for creative genius and love for people.
Then came the realization that she needed to find inner freedom — to understand how she could live her life outside of someone else’s direction and pave her own path, fundamentally based on her own vision. She quit, lived in New York and Mexico for a period, and then woke up one day with an unexpected idea: get a camera. As soon as she looked through the viewfinder, she was captivated by the ability to capture people’s emotions and stories within a single frame.
It felt like a portal where her intuitive vision and perception of the world could match their visual proof in a photograph. Growing up as the daughter of a photographer, she had been raised in a house with a darkroom where the mystery of bringing captures to life seemed like magic in her father’s hands. The house was full of cameras, umbrellas, and portraits of people she felt lived with them, so vivid were her father’s photographs.
This history — the black and white aesthetic of classic cinema, the proximity to creative fashion houses — shaped her portraiture. Her exhibition Power of Seeing opened at ME Dubai Hotel, designed by Zaha Hadid, in February. The title comes from a leitmotif borrowed from Avatar’s phrase I see you — seeing each other not only with sensory vision but on a deeper level, using an archive of experiences as a prism and love as the fundamental core.
Power of Seeing is seeing what we are regardless of any social, religious, or cultural roles. The exhibition featured four zones: Perpetual Beauty, Architecture of the Soul, Intricate Act of Being Art, and Life As Is.