Homeland (2008-2021) is an expansive photographic series that explores ideas of contemporary Russian identity, cultural heritage, and lived experience.
After moving from St. Petersburg to Western Europe in 2008, I began documenting each of my return visits with my camera. In my youth, the popularity of Western culture eclipsed my own and inspired my move away from home. But as I gained distance from the place where I grew up, I came to acknowledge Russia’s heritage and its societal contradictions in a new way. What began as a preservation of personal memory evolved into a visual project centered around the idea of ‘Russianness’, focusing on the people, landscape, and customs of my homeland – the familiar and the unknown, the historical and the contemporary, the engaging and the contentious. Taken over the course of 13 years, these images seek to illuminate the complexities of Russian identity, using a visual language that balances the documentary with the improvised.
Each time I returned to Russia to make photographs, I recognized a personal feeling of conflict between my life lived abroad and an increasing love for the homeland I left behind. Reconciling these feelings was a driving factor in traveling greater distances around the country (the world’s largest), conversing with new subjects, and investigating my family’s personal historical photographs and archives. The question of one’s relationship to their homeland is universal, as are the realities of changing generational experiences. It is within these broad themes that I examine the complications and peculiarities of my own homeland. A pair of glossy red shoes is swamped by mud; an Orthodox icon is watched over by a surveillance camera; a snapshot of an elderly woman in a headscarf rests on a stack of traditional cloth. Punctuating the imagined with the real, Homeland is a celebratory portrait of my country’s contradictions.
This series resulted in book “My Country Is Female” published by Kehrer Verlag in 2022.
