What is at the Centre of Your World? #4

By Piper Delilah / March 2025

A Conversation with Polina Melyan

Polina Melyan is a visual artist merging surveillance photography and abstract absurdism. Fixated on blunt honesty in an age of calculated and perfectly polished presentations of identity online. She creates as a consequence of an obsessive compulsion to capture and showcase the unique complexity of an individual. Observing humans, still, camouflaged, akin to a wildlife photographer observing a rare and feral specimen. Often resulting in pieces that feel intrusive and exploitative, the viewer is invited to question the issue of morality, Polina’s and one’s own.

Piper: What is at the centre of world?

Polina: So I have never actually considered it or thought about it before you asked me that question. I would like to have a frank conversation, so I am going to give you an honest answer instead of a curated one. I would say that I am at the centre of my world. My experience, my ego, my vanity. I think anyone that is going to say otherwise is either lying or they are talking about by-products of what I have just said. I think in the end it comes down to that.

Piper: I have had someone say it to me before, they said ‘me’, then looked shy after their answer. You know yourself, there is nothing to be shy about.

Polina: When you talk about other things it’s always a by-product of your experience. It is still all experience and ego.

Piper: You’re a photographer, how and when did find yourself getting into the field? First, a love for it, second, seriously pursuing it?

Polina: I have always been obsessed with watching people, I have always been a little stalker that grabbed a camera one day. I went into a camera shop one day when I was twelve, and thought, I am just going to get a camera and persuaded my parents to buy me one for my birthday. From then I was inseparable. Observing people, I am obsessed with watching faces, expressive specifically. It was a really shitty Sony and took really blurry pictures. Seriously getting into it… When I was seventeen I was in London on the weekend and rented a camera online off some guy. I thought ‘Yeh, I am just going to go out and take some pictures.’ I took some and showed them to my friends, they asked if they could take the piece I had shot and use it for their final project in school (for photography). I said ‘yeah sure, that’s pretty cool.’

Piper: So did they credit you?

Polina: No no, they just wanted to pass it off as their own. I wasn’t at that point attached to credit. In the end, they got the best grade class. It was an ego stroke. I am obsessed with people’s faces, that’s the end of it.

Piper: I have seen your work and you go more towards people looking uncomfortable. You are not so much concerned with beauty, you are more concerned with reality. But you are going for quite stark reality.

Polina: I am concerned about honesty. Love ugly faces, love wrinkles, love degeneracy. Whatever adds character to that particular person. I think beauty is quite boring.

Piper: When you get older, do you think you will try to preserve your youth, or let yourself age?

Polina: I think about it a lot, I haven’t yet decided how I want to age. I do find people that age naturally appealing to look at, but because I am so vain I don’t know how I would feel looking in the mirror every day, with wrinkles, grey hair. I haven’t decided yet, it’s a constant battle.

Piper: You like degeneracy but you are also very vain. I think it is quite fun.

Polina: I love degeneracy, but I never want to participate. I love observing conflict, observing an insane making-out sesh, but I never want to participate. I observe the motion. That is how I get my kick.

Piper: Your process of photographing?

Polina: It’s like a compulsion, when I see something and want to preserve the face of the moment. I take the shot and I am not attached anymore, I let go of the compulsion. Onto the next one. I like to be invisible when I photograph, I want to catch the person, I hate posing, even when photographing my friends when they are aware of being photographed. I like to conceal myself in the corner of the room. Like a creep waiting there for the right moment. I always like to stay invisible… I will never approach someone and ask to take a photograph, it’s not authentic to me personally.

Piper: If every time you walked into a room a song played, what would the song be?

Polina: Allan Rayman, Hello To Me. My favourite artist in the whole world.

Piper: If you were given a box of everything you had ever lost, what would you look for first?

Polina: The strange thing about me is that I am not attached to things of emotional or material value. I am quite careless with everything I own. When I get a new phone I never transfer the accumulated information from my former. Ever, ever, never. I am so not attached. If there was a box that could take everything tangible and intangible, I would reach for the feeling of being in love for the first time. That can never happen again, it was when I was twelve and purely platonic. I have been chasing the feeling ever since. I would love to experience that again.

Piper: I was looking back on my old notebooks recently, and a past friend of mine, Toby, said something brilliant. We were sat underneath a road in an orange-lit tunnel called Big Tunnel. He uttered a profound truth, he said ‘You only get to meet somebody for the first time once.’ He said that and I am always stunted when I think about it too much. I have to remind myself of it when I meet a new person. An interaction never happens twice.

Polina: To add to that, it used to be my favourite thing to do. To meet someone for the first and last time. Have a frank conversation with them but never exchange contact information. There is this place on Charlotte Street, I used to live around the corner, I used to go there every day, occupy myself with something. But what I was really waiting for was to get approached. It was like my hobby, I met many interesting people from a career perspective, from the British Museum to a restaurant owner down the street. When you meet someone for the first time, a fleeting encounter, you end up talking about ideas and concepts. Especially, like it when it’s frank, not small talk.

Piper: You are fleeting you are more open.

Polina: They would always give me their cards, I now have a pile will no intention of ever reaching out.

Piper: What is something you hope people notice about you when they first meet you?

Polina: All I really long for is for people’s perception of me to align with my own. So that is what I would want. I know that is an impossible ask because we see the world as we are. It’s rare, it happens. That’s all I really want.

Piper: I think my interactions, when I see somebody in a group I am one type of person, when I see somebody one-on-one I am entirely different. I feel like an imposter when in a group with all the people I see one-on-one. Everybody has a different perception. I have only ever felt truly myself with one person, that’s because when we met there was no one else around. Something I never thought rare but is. If all your work was going to burn in a fire, you could only save one photograph what would it be?

Polina: The thing is, in the same way I am not attached to things I am not attached to my work. I feel I haven’t made my best yet, so if everything burns, so be it. There is a polaroid I took of a dear friend of mine, who coincidentally was also my muse for a while. She was vital part of my development as a women when I was seventeen, she was twenty-one I think. I took this polaroid of her having sex with her ex-boyfriend in my mother’s bed in our apartment in Moscow. She was fine with it in the moment, but the next moment she cut it up into tiny little pieces and put it in the bin. She said she didn’t want me to remember her that way. I went into the bin, carefully collected all the pieces, glued them together, put them in my diary. But I couldn’t find one piece. So it’s this cut-up polaroid, cut into perfect pieces, stuck together, missing a piece I could never find. I don’t know whether she held onto it, but I went through the entire bin. I am not attached to it because of its artistic value, the moment to me… she meant so much to me, it’s more about bravery and the freedom of artistic expression. I don’t know how she feels about it now, I know she didn’t want me to have it, not because it was dirty, but because she wanted me to have a certain idea of her. This was her.

Piper: Thankyou Polina for your words.