The Poet of Modern Life Essay from the book DUOLOGUES*, published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2022 By Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova** We’ve inherited the idea of a female gaze as a reactionary counterpoint to the male gaze, which has dominated Western culture from the start. But perhaps we would benefit from discarding this paradigm altogether and embracing the vast cosmos of women and femmes alike. For centuries, women were relegated to the realm of the anonymous, as Virginia Woolf famously remarked, and it is only in recent years that we've begun to center and elevate them by name. As the founder of Women Street Photography, I am focused on bringing the work of women into view so that we can finally begin to understand the vast scope of our approach beyond the narrow confines of gender alone. I travel the globe creating Inclusive spaces for the exchange of ideas and meeting extraordinary artists like Nina Welch-Kling, who simultaneously honors the traditions of street photography while transforming it. Like Helen Levitt, Nina’s work is deceptively simple to anyone who has never tried to catch lightning in a bottle. But the best photography is always so. The longer you look at Nina’s work, the more complex it becomes, drawing you deeper into the mystery and magic of the everyday. The street, perhaps the most pedestrian, democratic, and accessible place on earth, is a marvelous mix of the mystical and the mundane, swirling in our midst while hiding in plain sight. Heeding its siren call, photographers flock to the street for the chance to transform the prosaic into poetry. Like all great modernists, Nina sees life as a configuration of light, color, composition, and form; it is in their infinite interplay that we craft stories about how we live and who we are. Rather than dictate her ideas and beliefs to us, Nina invites us to interpret the world for ourselves through the creation of diptychs that bring our imagination to life. Her images move in rhythm and rhyme, bouncing off one another so that we begin to feel the pulsating beat of life on the street. Sometimes they pitter-patter in eloquent repartee like two songbirds engaged in lyrical wizardry. Other times they flutter, quiver, shudder, shiver, thump, and throb, reminding us that anything can happen on the street – and quite often does. Not everyone sees the quirky details, revelatory juxtapositions, and subtle wit of street life as Nina does. Or perhaps they see it but just as soon forget, unable to preserve the strange and commonplace mixing and mingling everywhere we look. Like Brassaï, the great chronicler of Parisian life, Nina perceives the interplay of tones, textures, and patterns as clearly as she observes action unfold, brilliantly weaving them together into a kaleidoscopic tapestry of everyday Life. A pair of shaggy faux fur boots pound the pavement, a crisply uniformed doorman’s epaulet comes alive, tire tracks spin in circles through a carpet of gray slush, the polyester pleats of a priest's gown wait patiently for their moment in the sun — in these instants of quiet grandeur, Nina sees joy, beauty, humor, and love. A flâneur strolling through life, camera in hand, she patiently awaits the moment to reveal that the familiar and the foreign are the same time. * duologue: a play or part of a play with speaking roles for only two actors Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova is a Tatar-born American photographer and author, as well as the founder of Women Street Photographers.