Moscow.
The series was started or, rather, the subject was imposed on me in 1993. While walking up Seleznevskaia Street to the Novoslobodskaia underground station I ran across a camp set up in a public garden under an old fire tower. African women dressed in colours stood amid huts built of boxes, polyethylene and old blankets, naked toddlers were gambolling about. They were refugees from Somali and they were lucky that it was summer. The majority of them did not intend to stay in Russia, they regarded it as a transit country, but they were not welcome either here or in the West.пїЅ
Eight years later I found myself at an "underground" celebration of Easter held by a Catholic African community in a rented Moscow school-hall. The Africans were scared of skinheads, fascists, hooligans, etc. At the time I thought them overcautious. Later, having talked with African students, illegal immigrants, waiters, cooks and rank-and-file diplomats, I realized that they had just been realistic. Their fears are well-grounded, and they tend to think twice before going out or taking the underground. I remembered my encounter with African refugees in 1993 and thought that it had been the beginning of a (photo)story which ended in Podolsk, in the vicinity of Moscow, in the flat of an Angolan murdered by skinheads. I simply had to draw the line somewhere, although the subject, alas, is by no means exhausted. |
