Bohdan Nahornyi
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
Bohdan Nahornyi, also known as Canyon, is a Ukrainian photographer whose work blends self-portraiture, music, and material experimentation. He builds emotionally charged images influenced by songs, often printing them on office paper to bring out texture and imperfection. Working mainly with analog cameras, he turns everyday surroundings into quiet but surreal scenes. His ongoing series "Archetypes" reflects on personal weight, emotional survival, and the urge to push through social and inner constraints.
Q: Music runs through your process. How does a song usually turn into a photograph for you?
A: This can happen in different ways: either I was already influenced by the aesthetics that the artist laid down when creating a certain song, or I don’t see any promo and invent the images myself. The first option happens much more often. It’s like in botany: when a flower drops seeds into the ground to germinate a flower similar to itself, but they will still be different. I am grateful to every artist who inspires me as if they were my friends. I experience their emotions and follow their movement, but I do not disrupt the processes of my own development in photography by adopting someone’s style.
Q: In "Archetype" you use a red circle as a weight of personal problems. How did you land on that symbol?
A: I often use the shape of a circle in my photographs. It seems simple, but it hides something, something that cannot be seen inside. My love for geometry was instilled in me by my math teacher Tamara Ivanivna when I was in middle school. I often drew pyramids, rectangles, circles, and other things, and she said that I have a good geometric imagination. In this situation, the red circle is a physical object that holds me back, and my task is to find ways to break it, to get free. The archetype is like brutalism towards myself: “You don’t have to be weak to cope with difficulties,” and “You shouldn’t cry, because it will knock your mind off the path of stability and endurance” — at least that’s what the surrounding society is trying to drive into my head now, and the red circle is exactly the space I find myself in, where there are many negative experiences and problems.
Q: "Life Detention" and "Moving Walls" both deal with feeling stuck. Do you see them as part of the same story?
A: "Moving Walls" is like the next step after feeling stuck, which is what "Life Detention" is all about. As Fiona Apple said in her song “Fetch the Bolt Cutters, I've been in here too long.” I can relate to these words, people start moving walls because they can’t stand the arrangements they live in. The only question is who will start doing it faster and who will endure discomfort and fear of “one of the most terrible phenomena of the 21st century” — the “judgment of others.” Since I perceive photography on an extremely personal level, I went through a period of fear of judgment and started to move on. I recently took a photo where I was completely dressed in latex, imitating a cowboy. My legs, arms, and even my face were encased in a super sexualized type of material. Now I'm living in an academic environment and having my final year of study at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, where your teachers and lecturers see your social media, but I'm too old to be afraid to show myself from that side... It's no longer my problem if they don't accept it. That's what "Moving Walls" is about — reshaping yourself, walking new paths, and trying something different while moving the walls that you once created for yourself.
Q: Printing on cheap office paper has become part of your language. What does that material give your images?
A: A printed image is many times more interesting than a regular one — it's a combo of aesthetics from several directions at once: photography, typography, and sometimes even layout.
Since I'm an ardent fan of textures, it's important for me that everything is organic in this regard. Cheap office paper helped give my photos a newspaper style and made the colors more subdued, but also organized them correctly. Sometimes I have to artificially increase the brightness of the photo so that all objects are evenly formed. It's all experiments. I can make 10–15 prints for one photo, where I check which printing method was better and where the paint preserved the color gamut to the maximum.
Q: Self-portrait is central in your work. What keeps you returning to yourself as the subject?
A: It's very simple — I'm always around, and it's easier to get along with myself. I've always been interested in watching my new roles, like, for example, in the "Archetype" photo; it was the first photography where I openly cried hysterically. Sometimes my love for self-portraits becomes a topic for criticism of my image on the Internet, which I'm completely calm about. Warhol also made many self-portraits, which did not become his signature in art, but no one can deny that it could work in my case.
Plus the inspiration comes when no one is around. At different times in life, each person sees themselves differently, so I also want to document the periods I was in and compare them with who I became.
Q: You grew up in Ukraine during years of war. How has that backdrop shaped the way you make and see images?
A: Because of the war, me and millions of Ukrainians lost the opportunity to feel calmness and live a still life. This is a constant negative dynamic, a bunch of terrible news that needs to be digested daily. And all this makes me think that life is very short. The war made me understand that if I don’t start overcoming barriers, creating what I really like and looking for my style now, then I may simply not achieve it. Mostly I take surreal pictures, which are my escape from reality and constant emotional stress. It's as if I go to another room to rest, and after the pictures are created, I return to the world where there is news, explosions, losses, and fear for the future. In this case, it’s impossible to normalize this lifestyle. It is terrible.
