Living in Northern California for almost 30 years now I was not aware of harsh climate of beautiful Lake County until recently. It is an amazing place with stunning landscapes, very hot summers and quite cold winters. Not many regular California plants could survive and prosper there. There is only a couple of native trees proven to be right for the area, and the grasses are very strong and adoptive. To continue the genome process in these extreme circumstances, nature has developed its special way to do so by creating the strong vessels to save the seeds of the future generations and hold them until the conditions are right to spread them around. These vessels–cones, pods, acorns–have an extremely powerful presence and contain an immense beauty, which drawn me to start the “GRANA” (Latin for “SEEDS”) series and to celebrate the beauty of the nature.

Yelena Zhavoronkova is a California based Fine Art Photographer. Since 2010 her projects has been exhibited in de Young Museum of Arts, City Hall of San Francisco, Corden|Potts Gallery, SF Camerawork, Center for Photographic Art and RayKo Photo Center in the San Francisco Bay Area; SoHo Photo Gallery of New York; Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts; Blue Sky and LightBox Photographic Galleries in Oregon; and many other galleries around United States. Her projects were shown in Anzenberger Gallery in Vienna, Austria; in Milan, Italy and participated in Noorderlicht International Photo Festival INVIVO in Museum Belvédere, Heerenveen,The Netherlands. Her works and interviews were published in the online edition of The New Yorker magazine; Black and White, Analog Forever, All About Photo, Shutterbug magazines and Transformation literary journal, among others. As a part of the Indie Photobook Library Collection Yelena’s “Memories in Red” book is included in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. For four consecutive years (2016-19) she was a finalist in the Photolucida’s International Competition Critical Mass.