Elena Kuzmicheva, known online as slow_trees, is a photographer whose black-and-white images blend documentary photography with digitally added textures to create atmospheric, dreamlike scenes. Her mixed media pieces have been compared to the work of the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, mixing the monstrous with the banal.
A fellow contributor featured in the same zine described her work as “the soft side of my mind”, noting both a pessimistic and a naive side to it.Another profile called her images “a monochromatic memory, dust collecting on the shelves of nostalgia, mementos lost in a forgotten attic”, and praised her eye for landscapes.In a 2022 interview, Kuzmicheva said she had been photographing for about ten years and had no formal training in photography or art. Her practice grew out of grief, after the death of a close friend led her to a cemetery, where she photographed trees reflected in a granite monument and began using that image as a recurring texture in her work. She described her method as a spontaneous search for beauty, photographing what she encounters and layering the results with textures from earlier photographs until a piece feels complete.
