For Moldovan-born Olya Oleinic, photography provides a relational environment within which she moves with curiosity and ambition to share. Each of her works is its own ecosystem, where people, objects, and places are given room to be what they are, and the unanswered is allowed to remain a question. Her photography attends to intimate moments, finds unexpected correspondences, and traces gestural nuances.
Olya moves between artist collaborations, personal projects, fashion editorials, and commissioned work. What ties these different contexts together is a distinct point of view. Whether she is making images for Marni, Apartamento, or working with artists such as Elena Palumbo Mosca, there is always a sense of lived time and inhabited space in her work.
For this project, Olya created a series of images captured within a small area near her Paris home during a sweltering July in 2026. They are at once concrete and elusive depictions of day-to-day encounters with people in a distinct time and place.
“My work is observational, and I feel it isn’t about me, but who or what I am with, and the experience of the shared moment itself.”
Every project is a process of opening up to hearing and seeing anew, experiencing and witnessing what is there, and then passing it on. It means finding her own reflections within a chosen context:
“Maybe it’s about understanding your relation to a place you’re visiting, your place in it, how you, as a person and a maker, relate to it, and how people relate to you.”
Olya was in her teenage years when she got her hands on her first camera. “At that time it was a tool that helped me make some of my explorations more solid and tangible”, she says.
“Having grown up in a small flat with a family of four, every domestic space had a makeshift function. So, often, in order for me to hold on to the objects and transformations created within in this space, I chose to photograph them.”
Later, photography also provided a creative off-ramp. “I think there was an adolescent wish for departure from a notion of the familiar”, Olya adds. Gradually, the camera became a tool for transformation, preservation, and, in time, construction too.
“Eventually, my photography became more concerned with constructing for the image.”
One reason she finds photography a special medium is that it avoids words. “It allows you to just be and not say. And to look at the wider spectrum of what it can mean for somebody else.”
Aesthetically, she sees her photographic practice as making space for what she calls “a peaceful spirit”. “I’m drawn to things that allow your eye to rest with them”, she says. Her imagery is not defined by perfection, though. As she points out, “an image, scene or composition can feel imbalanced and asymmetric and still be strongly magnetic.”
Today, Olya is an established photographer, with commissions from major fashion houses and magazines, alongside ongoing collaborations with artists and publishers. For her, though, photography is and has always been a way of being. It’s how she moves through the world. Photography is something she keeps choosing.
“Photography, for me, is like any active relationship you have with a person. You’re choosing them every day, every month, every year, and you know that your relationship changes because you both grow or go to different places, but you agree to accept the differences and to keep walking together.”
Olya’s photography is constantly evolving. “It’s a natural process. And I let it, I allow it to be that.”
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