I will have to turn off the light, leaving the last

Photographers who remained in Russia help the whole country not turn into a "blind spot." This is how they feel - and remove

Due to the war in Ukraine and mobilization, Russia lost hundreds of thousands of professionals in various fields: ITSHNI, entrepreneurs, journalists and representatives of other industries were massively left the country. Not the most obvious, but very painful, in particular, the consequences of mass emigration of photographers. The country has lost people who daily recorded the changes taking place in it - and now more and more resembles a “blind spot”. But so far it has not finally become for them - thanks to those who remain. Medusa asked photographers who did not leave Russia, tell and show through the pictures how they see the reality around and how they feel themselves in the "world during the war."

What is happening today resembles an ugly collage from the fact that humanity has survived in the 20th century. As if a dream in which everything can happen. I would like to sharply open my eyes and exhale with a relief, they say, “I just faded ...” but no. In real time, we observe how the future that we counted on, built [plans] disappears, people that we have surrounded for so long disappear. Every day is filled with a mass of experiences, fears; And the news feed has long turned into a poisonous source from which you cannot help but drink.

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I am an incorrigible optimist. Was. Pain at the physical level, depression and hopelessness. The complete absence of the planning horizon: the day is living, everyone is alive and well, at large, it is already good. The city is empty, there are fewer traffic jams, you go into the coffee shop - only girls. There are fewer young guys on the streets, but more than the police and the Russian Guard. At the same time, in public places on weekends, do not push through. Everything is saturated with anxiety . Many are leaving. It seems that I will have to turn off the light, leaving the last.

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After September 21, I began to pay attention to the fact that the gender balance was significantly disturbed, and there are less and less men around. Some new stage of the nervous in the depths of the eyes of passers-by. As one of the heroines of my photo project about the women left without their men said: "Even the dog lovers stopped saying, everyone began to be afraid of each other." Numbness. Or, at least, holding the breath. The world around me froze in anticipation of the disaster.

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They say that interest and anxiety are two opposite ends of one spectrum. And now, having remained in Russia, I am again trying to drag the slider from one position to another. It is as if we are placed in a large ship with boarded up windows, which is located in the heart of the storm, and one god knows whether he will fly into rocks or we all, when the storm subsides, we will go to the shore of some new earth.

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In these pictures, a playground and a room in my house covered with camouflage nets. I weaved these nets all summer and autumn 2021 to shoot a series of photographs about childhood militarization, which would depict playgrounds covered with such nets. With the advent of the war, work on the project has become impossible. After the onset of mobilization, new meanings arose: the well -being of my own family was under threat. Now we live in constant fear that the husband will be forced to go to fight, and the children will be left without a father. These photos are my symbolic gesture of my mother and wife in an attempt to cover, protect my family from the war.

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I live in a country in which the word “world” and the reluctance of war is prohibited, and the overall situation resembles a notorious novel-antiopia. Increasingly, I want to be in the forest, dissolve in it, in its smells and sounds, to become one with him. I want to be away from the crowd, endless Dumskrolling and so that this madness ends.

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A lot of friends, acquaintances, colleagues left Russia, but a lot remained here because of study, work, and family. I have a military ID, but I did not serve in the army and did not go through military training. Among the acquaintances there are those who wanted to go to fight even before mobilization, now they have gone there. An unpleasant sensation, I would not want to see them on the Internet [on video or photo from the war]. There are those who received the summons, but are not going to mobilize. The agenda has not come to me yet. And my friend came.

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The totalitarian state is our new-old reality. The photo is the Levashov Memorial cemetery, the burial place of those who were shot in Leningrad during the Stalinist repressions of 1937-1953 .

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I live in a city where weapons have been doing for many years. There are several large defense enterprises. We serve the war. After the mobilization announcement, the city seemed to froze. A few weeks passed - and life flowed its turn. It is amazing how quickly people get used to.

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I choose to stay in Russia, but I am scared every moment of this choice. The militaristic agenda, the normalization of violence are now the daily components of the millionaire city.

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“Zigi” (symbols Z) did not immediately flood Yekaterinburg. At first they were not there, but after the attacks of the famous body *** (the hero gives an unflattering characteristic to the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov - approx. Medusa) local authorities were ashamed of their insufficient patriotism and stuck these sticker everywhere, where only possible, including the backs of ruin dogs running past. Now they are everywhere.

As for this picture, it was an ordinary gloomy Ural morning, and I saw a tram in which gloomy women rode. It would seem that everything is as usual, but Ziga, against the background of sausage, gave the frame a monstrous surrealistic meaning. Some doom and hopelessness appeared on this card.

I must say that I try to shoot all this obscurantism, and therefore I was ready for this frame. By the way, I did not meet this tram anymore.

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After the mobilization on September 21, announced by Vladimir Putin, if you do not go to the military commissariats and prefabricated points, almost nothing changed, in my opinion. Unless there are fewer young people on the streets, but this impression can be erroneous. But what happened to people inside was noticeably intensified. A degree of anger, doom, gloating, irritation, and someone and the joy that Russia is at war has clearly increased. Most of those who are against the war unleashed by Russia went into internal emigration and when they accidentally meet their own, they are desperately rejoicing.

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After the start of the war, I moved and began to live next to this park. Every time I go from home to the metro, I pass this attraction. And each time I look at the images of tanks and electric cars painted with red stars and military camouflage, with funny people skating in them. And when asked if Russian wars want, every time I see an answer. I am very tired, I can not even convince of my own person about the war. I have no internal strength to catch a “decisive moment”, build a composition, wait for the light. I just pressed the button and took off how it is. For me now, this is not the time of aesthetics in the photo. The main reaction from photography now is not WoW, but horror.

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I see that everyone is tired. It all started on February 24, September 21 - just a new round. Absolutely everything is tired: both those who are, and those who are against, and those who refrain. We are tired of living in tension, anxiety, in a misunderstanding of the next step of the "multi -income". The authorities continue to conduct non-stop festivals, carnivals and other shows, including patriotic, pretending that everything is in order. People are alive, they feel that not everything is in order, there is no plan for a long time, and this only adds fatigue.

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After February 24, the feeling of alienation from the surrounding reality was aggravated. There is no surprise from the fact that socio-historical unconsciousness took on the nature of the epidemic, and from the fact that common sense was either died, or it did not exist at all. The common sense that we learned at school when we were preparing to live in a normal democratic country, in partnership with neighboring countries. My Russia remained somewhere on the pages of citizenship textbooks, but I do not want and can not live anywhere else.

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I seem to have never felt so alien in the country and live derealization. It is difficult for me to do nothing or fall into the "delay" mode, so I continue to shoot. In Russian society, a substitution of concepts is shown. Through the TV, people are trying to convey that “special operation” is “peace”, despite the fact that many Russians grew up in the understanding that war is horror and death. Therefore, often in families you can meet that all family members advocate peace, but with its different understanding. People live in a radically different realities, and the tension grows.

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Nothing happens in my city. As if it were not February 24 and September 21. Everyone inhaled, froze - and cannot exhale, they are afraid to worry the beast inside. After all, here it is, life, nothing has changed: just rare green ribbons, rare single pickets and stickers with two words that the police had not yet noticed. It just became even more alarming to people. Just people became even more silent and quieter.

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On September 29, I realized that I almost did not remember what happened since September 21. The news of mobilization. Friends who are taken to a “special military operation” at night to die and kill. Friends who leave in a hurry somewhere. Friends who are planted for 15 days "for petty hooliganism." Most of the suffering causes a lie that we repeat to ourselves. We now live in a world where things are not called their names. And this is pain.

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What has changed? Everything is still, only at night I see dreams about the war, and during the day my mind appeals to the world. More acutely the need for a loved one is nearby, simple joys, and all small and vains disappears. I feel the fragility of human life and our planet, the confusion of man before the scale of what is happening. This is a time of difficult changes, the time of disorientation of people where everyone chooses a role - victims, punisher, judges, advocate of rights and freedoms, public figure, preacher or observer. I chose the last, I have no position. I want to carry good for peace in our families and hearts.

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On September 30, I was going to illuminate protests against mobilization in Makhachkala . It seems that these plans were annoyed by someone, so they detained me right in the middle of the street and put me for five days in a special receiver. Employees of the Center for Combating Extremism of False Augers that I "behaved aggressively, expressed obscene abuse, did not react to the repeated demands of the police to stop the repeated demands of the police." Behind the bars, I received both news from friends and a message from a neighbor in a camera trying to convert me to Islam. He believed that to throw away such texts - blasphemy, and asked to tear them first, and then burn them.

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To agree with exciting anxiety, my way is to walk a lot or just move, cutting time between business. One of these walks coincided with the final closure of the season on the embankment. The door is nowhere, the shore, a concrete parapet, a strong wind before the weather, the sea, which can become a way, expensive, exit. Or not become - too many influencing factors. But in any case, we will find unknown and uncertainty.

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I'm afraid. I'm afraid that they can try to call me into the army. I'm afraid that I can’t earn enough for a decent life, since our country is rolling into some abyss. I'm afraid that the revolution may happen and the person will come even more far from the economy and the desire for the world. I'm afraid that my children grow in an increasingly hostile and aggressive environment.

A natural desire - to leave, hide, leave, is fenced off. In the city, the feeling that your apartment and the world that we built were fragile are increasingly stronger. The state does not cost anything to break everything without the slightest thought. Only nature gives some reassurance. The sounds of the sowing forest, birds, the noise of water, orange dawn and purple sunsets, autumn forest and dry grass, cool shadow and heat of the sun.

But you just have to read the latest news - and you understand that this is all an illusion. The feeling of protection is ephemeral. I have nothing to cover myself.

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It is difficult for me to feel that sudden fear for my life that thousands of children of central Russia experienced, waking up in the morning in September and learning about mobilization. I live in Dagestan. Bessing executions, abduction and persecution of people - this is what was bothering me for years, and not a crookedly composed summons in the mailbox. I was already in such a position that I was afraid to spend the night at home, afraid of cars passing nearby. Suddenly they will be stuffed into her and taken away from the unknown where? I am tired of being afraid, so now I am completely calm and are not going to leave anywhere.

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If possible, in the near future we will leave Russia. In this regard, I have different emotions, among which there is unexpectedly recognized something like sadness in the territory left in which I lived all my life. To yearning for Russia is quite strange in the context of current events, given that in recent years all my work was fed with the inability to be “my own”, a sense of loneliness and the inconsistency of what is happening. How was it possible to change in "relations with the homeland" at such a moment?

In one of the telegram chats with friends, I read that this is something like a phantom pain. Only the pains are not from the lost, but from what, it seems, there has never been, and you feel it especially acutely because just at this moment it becomes clear: it was not and will not be.

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There is no place for words.

"Jellyfish"