Bio

I photograph from a place of distance. Some of that comes from my biography — born on the Texas Gulf Coast, an early childhood raised in a Bavarian village, later living in France, and through studies and artistic work that took me to Russia and Ukraine — I have lived a life spanning great distances and carried with me a sense of being outside the common context. That perspective shapes the way I view things, and the way I make pictures.

My photographs are studies in perception — how light, line, and structure shape the way we move through and dwell in space. I am drawn to architectural thresholds: corridors, windows, bridges, and other forms that frame silence and guide passage. In these spaces, structure becomes metaphor: a frame that contains fragility, a form that holds what would otherwise fall away.

Equally, I am drawn to remnants of rural life — barns, bridges, farmsteads — where symmetry and geometry endure even as weather and time erode their surfaces. These structures are not monuments but witnesses, fragile carriers of memory. In their weathered walls and utilitarian forms, I find a resonance with my own sense of distance: belonging and estrangement held together in one frame.

Influenced by wabi-sabi aesthetics and the New Topographics, I search for beauty in what is overlooked, transitional, or decaying. Working primarily in black and white, I reduce the world to essentials — light and shadow, texture and emptiness — creating images that hover between documentation and abstraction. Figures, when they appear, move quietly through these spaces, reminders of scale and our ephemeral place within the built world.

Through these studies, I aim not to capture monuments, but moments: the stillness of silence, the tension of passage, the resilience of form, and the way structures — whether modernist corridors or collapsing barns — frame our experience of time.

Stefi Shakhirev is a photographer based in rural Iowa whose work explores distance, estrangement, impermanence, and the quiet tension between presence and absence. Born on the Texas Gulf Coast, she spent her most formative childhood years as the only American child in a small Bavarian village steeped in the cultural, political, and social residue of the second world war. Returning to the United States at age nine was disorienting — she could not recognize the nativity of the country she had left. Later, time living in France as a young adult deepened her European worldview and left her permanently attuned to her unwitting estrangement: an American shaped by places that exist now only differently, and most vividly in memory.

Her M.A. in Humanities (2004) from California State University focused on Russian and Soviet history, a field of study that took her to Russia and Ukraine, where she also worked in music. These experiences infused her artistic vision with an awareness of resilience, melancholy, and the fragile beauty that emerges from cultural and historical upheaval. They continue to inform her aesthetic: attentive to the overlooked, the metamorphosing, and the enduring traces of memory.

This perspective defines her photographic practice. Shakhirev works from a position of distance, capturing moments that feel both aloof and intimate — a gaze that draws viewers inward rather than merely presenting a scene. While much of her work engages with the pastoral/dystopian tension of the Midwestern landscape — decaying barns, abandoned fields, meadows of hay — her lens also turns toward still life, portraits, and fleeting moments anywhere she finds them. What unites these images is a search for the under-recognized and impermanent, the subtle details that bind memory, time, and consciousness. Her work is grounded in realism, yet often edges into the surreal through reflection, abstraction, and unexpected juxtapositions.

Her work has been exhibited across the Midwest, including the Small Works Art Show at the ArtWise Gallery in Grand Forks, North Dakota; PBS’s Iconic America traveling exhibit in Red Oak, Iowa; and Abandoned & Discovered in the Midwest at the Sault Area Art Center in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.