Kich-Gorodok

I shot a small town in the northern part of Russia named Kich-Gorodok.

I shot a small town in the northern part of Russia named Kich-Gorodok. It is ordinary town with ordinary life, like hundreds of similar towns across the country. I went through villages around it which were almost depopulated and shot portraits of people still living there, and my companion Ania Petrova re-shot family archive pictures belonging to them. I tried to shoot in the same style as village professional photographers who were invited to make pictures of weddings, funerals, kids and feasts from the beginning of XX century. I wanted to continue local tradition of posed portraits 'in the best dress with serious face'. It helps me to connect all these people in their feeling of being Russian, in common atmosphere of irrationality and some kind of surrealism, in such a Russian combination of absurd and beauty, sadness and kitsch, family and history, life and death.