“Love what you do and what you post.” This is the mantra of Laura Zalenga, the 27-year-old photographer from Munich, Germany, whose solitudinous portraits in zen environments have attracted a serious following of more than 135,000 on Instagram and an additional 450,000 on Facebook. With a Sony a7R II full-frame mirrorless camera, paired with either an 85mm or 35mm lens, she now travels the world one-third of the year, exercising her passion as well as capturing imagery for brand partnerships.
Zalenga, originally a student of architecture, is a self-taught photographer who began honing her style by sharing her work on Flickr. The community on the photo-sharing site provided valuable feedback as well as additional influence—she cites Kalie Garrett and Rosie Hardy as inspiration—but she admits that “nowadays there is a whole list of people who every now and then post a photo that takes my breath away.”
It’s not only other people’s work that leaves Zalenga in awe, but the people themselves. For her “1,001 Strangers” series, Zalenga photographed exactly what it sounds like–more than a thousand strangers whose faces caused her to look twice. The project began simply enough as a challenge to improve her comfort in approaching and talking to strangers. “It was very hard. Walking through streets full of people, everyone thinks you just want to sell something when you approach them,” she confesses to AdoramaTV. “Therefore I normally I start [the interaction] with a very fast sentence about the fact that I don’t want to sell anything and I don’t want a name. I want a photo, because I love the way they look or dress, or just their aura. Even those who don’t agree do smile.”
This exercise in extroversion quickly took a deeper meaning, as Zalenga focused on protesting same-ness through her portraits: “In a world where social media teaches us that looking like the twin of some idol is the goal, I love people who decide to look different or who celebrate their unconventional look.” And you won’t find her setting up shots at any of the so-called “Insta-famous” locations around the world; Zalenga describes her favorite locales as “for those who explore and like rainy days.” One such spot is Isole di Brissago, a pairing of islands in Lago Maggiore, barely over the Swiss border from Italy. It’s all “old trees, interesting roots, foggy bamboo forests, natural beaches and so on,” she says.
When it comes to sharing her images of people and places on Instagram, Zalenga stands out as a master of the three-block, panorama-style of posting, making the app’s default grid format work to showcase, rather than thumbnail, her images. “I think it just makes the whole look of my stream more calm,” Zalenga notes to AdoramaTV, throwing shade at Instagram’s mysterious algorithms. “I simply love landscape format and think it suits my photos a lot more than square or portrait-format.”
A recent image, of a young girl dressed as an astronaut and gazing out from a room into the wider universe, marks a new direction for Zalenga. “As I normally mostly work with grown-ups, it was so amazing to work with young girls, to see how they see the world with different eyes, and how they still dream big,” she shares. The work is the first in a partnership between Zalenda and Disney, hashtagged #DreamBigPrincess or #GlaubeAnDichPrinzessin. For each like and comment on the images, Disney will donate $1, up to maximum of $1 million, to GirlUp, the United Nations Foundation’s program supporting adolescent girls’ leadership and empowerment.
