Moscow Girls - series of C-print photographs

Moscow Girls is a series of nine portrait photographs which, when first exhibited in London, was accompanied by soundtracks of each of the Moscow girls talking with an over-dubbing of her words in English translation. Conscious of the writing of Vilem Flusse in which images can embody messages about the social fabric of modern cities, Moscow Girls invited the participants to choose everything about the images (apart from the photographic technology and format) including their own narratives. The narratives are intended to open up spaces of experience that would otherwise be unavailable to the western world. One of the narratives focuses on elderly people returning to their home town of Crinitsa, near Chernobyl, in order to die there. Another narrative tells the story of a more comfortable life following perestroika and glasnost but which eventually created more corruption and unhappiness according to the narrator. Moscow Girls therefore casts the artist as mediator between the participants and the viewer who is held in the gaze of the portrait subjects.

When Moscow Girls was subsequently exhibited in other venues the soundtrack was removed although in the researcher solo exhibition’s at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin (Moscow Girls and Other Stories, 07/04/06-28/05/06, curated by Katja Blomberg) extracts from the spoken narratives appear as texts in the exhibition catalogue. This was intended to bring a certain freedom to the viewer and encourage more of the viewer’s own projections onto the images. In Berlin, Moscow Girls was accompanied by four other series and a video work making (41 pieces in all).

Moscow Girls was also shown at the first Moscow Biennale (2005), The Photographers Gallery, London (21/01/05-21/02/05, curated by Charlotte Cotton), 1x1=3 at ACP Australian Centre for Photography (20/04/07-26/05/07, curated by Susan Bright)

Reviews: Berliner Zeitung and Gabriel Coxhead’s illustrated feature in Portfolio, issue 41.