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Roman Kirienko
@makeworldgreatagain
Artist based in Russia
I’m just an inspired guy from Moscow with a camera, capturing the world around me with passion and soul and trying to reach my wildest dreams by pushing my own limits away. This hasn’t come easily; it took many years for me to understand how and what I’m doing it for. My life has been complicated with its ups and downs but art has always been the one stable factor.
"Since I was a kid, I have loved everything about art, music and photography. So I chose my own way many years ago."
In 1999 I started playing guitar in bands and in 2006 I bought my first point-and-shoot camera. It went really natural and only later I realized that I had a great opportunity to see the world through my lenses. Till 2015 it was just a hobby for me, which then became the source of everything else I cherish now. As a normal guy I lived many years doing nothing in particular but the same things every day. Ben Stiller’s character in the movie “The secret life of Walter Mitty” was very similar to me at that time. I was a middle class manager too with a bunch of problems, trying to figure it out but every time, I got lost in that fight. It’s a classic, simply impactful movie that I watched when I was 30 and left me thoughtful. It was the moment I too realized that I needed to open my eyes – It took three years for me to start a new life and feel reborn as a creative person.
"Paolo Coelho's book " Diary of a Magus" also played a role in this realization and this new start."
It is a book about his spiritual journey on the Camino de Santiago. Things in my head started going the right way. I got it clear that life can be lived differently and that is where I started dreaming. I wanted to be my own boss with my own responsibilities and benefits. I wanted to work on living passionately without any fear and regrets. For a while I had this continuous feeling that I had to do something. That the world was waiting for me. One day I got this simple but strong feeling: Just GO! So I did.
"I quit my full time job 3,5 years ago and that’s where my journey began."
Before this I was a touring musician and IFRS manager in banks and insurance companies. Now I’m a freelance photographer and writer. In 2017, I went on my first long trip to India and Vietnam. I spent 4-5 months, wrote a book “Time to live, time to travel”, started my instagram and grew immensely in every sense. I travelled around whole India by foot, buses and trains but in Vietnam I bought a bike and drove across the country from south to north like the guys from Top Gear. While travelling Vietnam I had three accidents – nobody got hurt but me. It was a very tough road trip that made me stronger and happier than I had ever felt before. The road was the only thing that mattered, so I kept going and felt the moment with an open heart.
"I just truly lived it. And that has been my philosophy for all my travels to come."
Later in 2017-2018 I lived in Israel and crossed the country by foot doing the Shvil Israel route (1000 km) from kibbutz Dan to Negev Desert. About that trip, I wrote my first travel book – in diary style – The Story of One Journey. I slept in a tent while hearing voices of coyotes, survived from bomb attacks from Gaza which helped me stop fearing anything and many other deeply impressive events that have had a strong impact on who I am today.
"My life is just a point on God's watches. So if I die today I accept it with all my gratitude."
After having traveled through Asia for a few months I went back to work in Israel again until COVID-19 brought me back to Moscow where I am now working on some shootings and two more books. I believe writing has been a great help to reflect and understand things in life. While travelling I wrote stories along my photos and at the end bundled them all together in my book Story Of One Journey that I just mentioned. It is about my daily routines, the roads I traveled, the people I met, about getting lost in the desert without any GPS gear or when you’re trying to hide from hungry and angry coyotes. But in general it’s all about nature, beauty and the sacred human dreams.
The second book is a kind of diary as well, about India, but here I went deeper into all possible levels of the experience. Time to live, Time to travel is a piece in which I’m talking about how to change your life, how to achieve vital things in life such as happiness, motivation and inspiration, how to grow as a person and of course there are many stories about magical India. I travelled the whole country from south to north – from Kanyakumari to Himalayas, Rishikesh. I spent the day as a monk in Holy Varanasi, I saw cremation and fire ceremonies, battled with monkeys and went crazy on Holi celebration in Jaipur.
I am a very spiritual person and want to live spiritually in all levels of my life. It affects all I do such: music, photography or writing. My main philosophy is to live in balance with your mind and soul. Both are important but in spite, normal, everyday life isn’t about these. Continuous practice is needed to obtain understanding of how society and the cruel world work and what they want from you. Our world is a very materialistic place where we forget about the soul, mostly care about money and hardly touch upon humanity or gratitude. It was my trip through Vietnam that taught me about the importance of having the right balance in life – a balance that is helping me now to constructively collaborate and participate in this world.
My Instagram handle Make the world great again, has been based on this tendency of thoughts. In the period of thinking about a name for my profile I was surfing the internet and came across only negative news – how the world was falling. So I thought that only we can help this world to rise again, with our love and passion. Ever since I have had the purpose of trying to make the world great again – beginning with my own world.
I believe Instagram is a good tool to not only share photography, but also positive energy and inspiration. First of all, self inspiration is indispensable in order to create, just like self love is key for expressing love to others sustainably. It is the kind of inspiration independent from anyone or anything else that you need to keep going, that you generate within yourself. Another big source of inspiration for me are other creators like me belonging to the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian photographers community. We’re inspiring and stimulating each other. And last but not at least, life is the main inspiration for all my works.
"I include life experiences and related emotions into my art, describing it from different angles."
That is also why for me, photography and traveling go inextricably together, as two sides of one coin. When I’m looking through the shots from the places where I have lived or travelled I’m feeling passionate and touched; those are the experiences that have affected my life, that my life consists of, and that I managed to capture.
"It is a way of living. Just imagine that you are the chief director of your movie about your own life; write a script and film it through your soul."
On Editing:
I decided to commit myself to bring (in particular Russian) talent together. I made several preset packs for people which are available to buy on Filtergrade and also I owned Telegram channel where I share my own presets and other editing secrets for free.
Personally, I like deep shadows, moody colors and layers in a shot and I also choose to concentrate on a one-two color gamma with many lights in the sky and a lot of grain as if shot was made on film.
However, currently I don’t have one strategy for editing and as I use different approaches while editing photos for my IG profile. I might say that I prioritize composition, then color grading. The times when people used too much warmth and high saturation are gone. Now you see less contrast and split toning which is the main goal for many popular creators such Garrett King or Luke Stackpoole. In this case you need to understand how color works depend on each other, how curves affect the shot together with shadows and highlights.
A strong instrument for editing are the graduated and radial filters such as the adjustment brush which can help you to improve the sky, the ground or front object details. A little bit of grain and sharpening is a key to create some mood in a shot without forgetting about details.
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