The Shadow

Through portraits of millennial women who grew up in the post-Soviet space, I explore what happens when they face their Shadow and stop breaking themselves to fit someone else’s expectations.

They say millennials are the most anxious generation. Millennial women are a story of their own. And women who grew up in the post-Soviet space - that’s where the story narrows even further. I believe the cure for anxiety lies in what Jung called the Shadow. Stop lying to yourself - and everything changes. I photograph women around me. We are thirty-five, almost forty. Most of us have reached this age carrying the weight of “you must” on our backs. That’s how we were raised. “I” is the last letter of the alphabet (it’s “Я” in Russian), they used to say to us. Only now we begin to break the boundaries that have long felt normal, the ones it’s so hard to breathe within.

I first picked up a camera two years ago, and it changed the way I see people. Through black-and-white portraits, I explore what happens when the women I shoot face their Shadow and begin to see a way out of the exhaustion that comes from always having to be something for someone. I don’t ask them to pose. I wait for the moment when they let go, and then I say: “The feeling you really want to show - can you look at me through it?” When it works, I manage to catch that moment. And when I’m lucky enough, I see both their Shadow and my own.