BIASED REALITY

Six years ago, I bought my first smartphone with a built-in camera. Since then, photography has become my daily practice. While exploring my archive of 50,000 images, I came to the conclusion that provincial Russia continues to cultivate the visual codes of the 1990s. The farther one moves from the center, the more traces of the past emerge on the surface of the present.

My childhood fell in the 1990s in Samara, and perhaps that’s why I instinctively notice details that act as affective triggers. I photograph familiar spaces — the city, private interiors, everyday scenes, but treat them as projections of an inner state. This is not observation, but a visual reconstruction of perception, where reality appears unstable, fragmented, assembled from accidental coincidences.

In essence, the series represents a ride on public transport from the city center to its distant outskirts, followed by a walk through its periphery. There, where urban spaces renew more slowly and the material remnants of the past are not completely erased, time becomes visible. The title “Prejudiced” refers not only to the subjectivity of vision but also to the very nature of reality — it is always already interpreted, colored by ideology, memory, and experience. Photography, therefore, does not record reality but models it, illuminating what usually remains on the periphery of attention.

2017-2022