girl who used to be
2016-2017
2016-2017
In this series I take pictures of femininity trying not to be an objective researcher, but to pass all these images through myself, compare them with my personal experience.
The pictures were taken in a small Crimean province, town of Primorskiy where I was born. As many people of my age I spent my childhood and adolescence surrounded by women. When I left my hometown and acquired some independence I started comparing myself with all these local women and thinking which one of them I would have been like if I have stayed there.
I think about women who grew up among the freedom of beautiful nature contrasting that much with conservative and well-established people’s ideas about the world and themselves. I shoot women of different ages, those who live in my memories and my past, those who echo inside of me. I think about whether they manage to save themselves and not to integrate into the monotonous song of an average post-Soviet village.
I think about how much this closed provincial world shapes dreams and desires of girls and women who live there, about how ambivalently they combine femininity and ambitions. I feel like an integral part of this world where the infinite sea-line touches dozens of people’s horizons of hopes, fears, nostalgia and expectations