Having moved to the U.S. in 2022, I was lucky to immediately find myself in the community of Russian-speaking emigrants of the so-called Fourth Wave. These are emigrants from the USSR and later Russia, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.
I visited them at their homes and took photographs and videos where they told their stories of emigration.
I visited them at their homes and took photographs and videos where they told their stories of emigration.
As part of the photo series, I tell these stories through the things that were in my subjects’ suitcases when they first arrived in the U.S. At that time, it was a one-way journey. Like cosmonauts landing on a foreign planet, they knew nothing about the new world where they would have to live. And what did they take with them? Family relics, toys, and useful household items such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, wooden spoons, cast-iron skillets, and tablecloths. Some still keep these objects in a hidden treasured box, others use them in daily life, some had to climb up to the attic to find them among piles of old junk, and some even had to travel to another state to retrieve them from their parents.
I suggested playing with these objects, and my subjects gladly joined in. Much of the staged photos with things was not invented by me, but by them. And to inspire them, I became part of the game myself — I took the most absurd thing I brought to the US, a pair of high-heeled boots, and staged a photo session — 30 different uses for high-heeled boots.
The project’s title — From Russia to Hope Street — comes from the cover of a 1990 magazine article about the family of one of my subjects, who in fact moved from Russia to Hope Street in Boston in 1987.
I believe that through this project, many of my subjects saw their long-cherished objects from a new perspective. We played with them, used them out of context, dusted them off, and took them down from their pedestals. And along with that, their memories of the traumatic experience of emigration also received a push toward rethinking. My project encouraged them to look back at those events from afar — from the perspective of their adult, established lives — with humor, and almost without pain.
The project’s title — From Russia to Hope Street — comes from the cover of a 1990 magazine article about the family of one of my subjects, who in fact moved from Russia to Hope Street in Boston in 1987.
I believe that through this project, many of my subjects saw their long-cherished objects from a new perspective. We played with them, used them out of context, dusted them off, and took them down from their pedestals. And along with that, their memories of the traumatic experience of emigration also received a push toward rethinking. My project encouraged them to look back at those events from afar — from the perspective of their adult, established lives — with humor, and almost without pain.
