Playing with the light and the structure of the image can be the best way to do that.” We have these 3D objects in photographs, I want to keep the viewer a little bit longer so they think about how they are seeing. “I want to change the view, to make the audience stop and question what they are looking at,” she explains. In doing so she questions the medium of photography, and how it presents reality. Syrko’s fantastical photographs are often read as digitally manipulated or even AI-generated, but she makes them with lo-fi analogue techniques such as smoke, mirrors, water, and even paint. Today, her work contrasts the physical experience of living with how people are presented in images. A year later, she held her first exhibition. But she was always interested in taking photographs and when she was 15 her grandfather, who was blind, scrimped and saved to buy her a serious camera. Born in Lviv in 1995, Marta Syrko didn’t grow up with links to culture or art.