Brightness

The protagonists presented in these photographs are an orphan generation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians that came of age in an ideological vacuum, having disowned their past, but with no orientation in the present.

The protagonists presented in these photographs are an orphan generation of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians that came of age in an ideological vacuum, having disowned their past, but with no orientation in the present. Their constructed worlds of fashion, ornament, and spectacle are erected as defense against historic dislocation and atonement for frustrated expectations and unfulfilled fantasies. They seek to define who they are and what it means to be a Ukrainian or a Russian in relation to their own past and future. Photographed in shiny malls of tomorrow and the Khrushchev apartments of yesterday, they invent new roles and change costumes, collectively and individually rebuilding their post-Soviet worlds. “If you can’t draw well, draw richly” is a saying that captures the self-awareness inherent to the psychology of Brightness. These tableaux of a new post-Soviet subjectivity are a projection of their own imaginations as they are of mine.