Welcome back, Canyon!

This is my attempt to reclaim the joy of photography as my life quietly reshapes itself

Photography helps pull me out of the abyss of routine that I so often fall into for one reason or another. After spending so much time under constant stress, I began to fear that I had lost something deeply important. Still, step by step, I want to reclaim it for myself and this series is my first step.

The new series moves away from Canyon's usual way of seeing things. It marks his first return to conceptual photography in four months after silence. All the images were created using only phone (except for picture #7, which includes older work on a Polaroid camera), while the final works exist as handmade collages printed in local topografía in Spain.

There is something unexpectedly intimate, and at times absurd, in asking strangers to print images of my butt cheeks, yet that vulnerability became part of the process itself.

This shift was not a conceptual decision at first, but a necessity. Canyon left his home twice during a fill-scale invasion in Ukraine and arrived in Spain with almost nothing for creative process: most of his previous prints, materials, and cameras remained in Lviv. Starting again from zero forced him to rethink the why he sticks concept and images together. In a way, this limitation brought closer to the idea of camera-less photography - not by literally abandoning the camera, but by questioning its role and focusing instead on the physicality and hidden messages of the image.

“Welcome back, Canyon!” - that is what the shop assistant at the Chinese hardware store said when I went there twice in the same day to buy stickers for a collage. She asked where I was from, probably because of the slight accent in my English. People here forget the name Bohdan within seconds, so I told her my name was Canyon. Later it struck me when she said it, drawing parallels with my own doubts about whether I truly wanted to return to making conceptual work.

Abstraction in this series reflects displacement and reconstruction. It mirrors the experience of starting over, where fragments of the past are reassembled into something new, yet never fully resolved. This process has changed the way he sees his work - less as a finished image, and more as an evolving object shaped by context, limitation, and touch.

For the first time, I seriously confronted a question that had been circling in my mind for a long time: “What if I’m doing some pointless nonsense?” It lived alongside other thoughts: “There is too much of me in the frame, and frames without me stop being about me,” and “I’m afraid to go beyond my fantasies, because that means taking responsibility for who I will become.” All of this led me to one conclusion: I had accepted this world in its authentic form for far too long. It was time for the world to accept me.

This series was created over the course of five days. The photographs were produced in the style of digital pop art, or photo hyperpop and were inspired by the music of Robyn, Smerz, Slayyyter, and Rosalía.