20 years ago I enrolled in the Environmental Design program at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. The programme was rooted in Bauhaus and Constructivism; we made architectural models by hand and then photographed them for critiques. Those early utilitarian images made me reflect on photography’s ability to transform scale and alter our perception of space. Through years of researching the various aspects of picturing places and exploring different approaches towards visualising the complex layers that comprise the field of environmental studies, I arrived at documentary photography. I was focused on the subjects and not as much on the aesthetics, using photography’s ingrained seductive quality to initiate a dialogue with a wider audience than a typical visitor of a gallery. Among other things, I am drawn to photography for its democratic potential, its ability to travel far and wide.

I moved to Miami in 2016 and began documenting the surroundings first simply to process my relocation. Throughout Miami’s streets and highways I found myself immersed in a kaleidoscopic world of idealised versions of the city depicted in a myriad of billboards, printed construction fences and ads. That year I also experienced my first hurricane with its alarming consequences and continued my speculative shooting routine, focusing more closely on the signs of environmental vulnerability in the area. The following year a major hurricane hit South Florida and it became clear that the city’s buildings and infrastructure weren't prepared to withstand the increased risks due to rising sea levels. I found the dichotomy between the precarious reality and the projected fantasy image of Miami as a tourist paradise and solid opportunity for real estate development darkly ironic and highly symbolic. Thus began FloodZone, a project about those contrasts in perception and looming climate anxiety; it is comprised largely of metaphorical images, rather than literal depictions of climate change. Despite the devastation I have seen, I remain an optimist, albeit with a realistic perspective that certain places and human life within them, including my home state, will be dramatically transformed in the next few decades. Without being didactic or adhering to photojournalistic principles, I hope my photographs resonate with those willing to pause and unpack the layers within them. I am preoccupied with the psychology of places and always aim to visualise their nuances as encountered by an everyday person, providing a humanistic, and perhaps female, perspective

My work explores how photography is used to illustrate concepts of beauty and nature in contemporary visual culture by examining and creating photographic typologies of natural and human-intervened landscapes. In 2013 I began what was to become a long term project, Landscape Sublime, that challenges traditional landscape depictions in advertising and social media in which algorithms of popular taste have taken notions of the sublime that emerged in eighteenth-century Western art to an extreme. In response, I printed and assembled sourced images into three-dimensional installations that I rephotograph, with the final images falling between depictions of true physicality and computer-generated illusions. FloodZone similarly responds to the power images have in shaping understandings of the world, capturing environmental changes in Florida with a broad range of photographs that coalesce into an acute perspective on life in an at-risk area amid forces that deny those very risks. The recently published Floridas project also takes as its subject the unique forms of nature and culture that only occur in the sunshine state. These photographs capture the seductions and disappointments of a place that has come to symbolise the contradictions of the United States today, and build on images by photographers who have come before, notably Walker Evans. My newest project Image Cities takes a global view of postindustrial cities that share an ever-collapsing integration of the photographic image and the built environment. Moving through Moscow, Paris, New York, and London, among others, the project highlights shared facets of the cities’ urban landscapes as well as their individual attempts to promote themselves via the repurposing of select aspects of their histories. Overall, my work incorporates observational photography, studio practice, and installation, utilising tools and strategies related to digital media and commercial photography to explore environmentalism, consumerism, and the picturesque.

In 2018 while actively working on the FloodZone project I took a road trip to the west coast of Florida to photograph an unusual structure, whose story had fascinated me for years. The Cape Romano Dome House looks like it could belong to a sci-fi movie set, but it was in fact a functioning vacation home built by an oil magnate in the 1980s. It was initially located on land, with a 700 ft setback from the shore, but it is now entirely cut off by the encroaching water. The house has no landings or dock facilities as it was never meant to be accessible by boat. Right now boating is the only way to reach it and I had to rely on a captain to navigate the shallow muddy waters, our journey interrupted by a large pod of dolphins hunting along our route. The surreal looking structure now serves as a landing spot for migrating birds and an artificial reef for marine life. That trip also inspired me to pursue a parallel project, Floridas, as I discovered an archive of 32 photographs from the west coast of Florida made by Walker Evans in the 1940s. The book of the project was published by Steidl in 2022 and contains both my images and rarely seen historic photographs and paintings of Florida by Walker Evans.

While I don’t have a single favourite image – because all 86 of them in the book are integral to the whole story – the most meaningful one for me is the Flooded Garage. The composition is simple – a child wearing a bike helmet standing ankle-deep in a pool of dark water in a flooded building, my shadow in the afternoon sun to the right. I took this photo the day after Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017 as a Category 4 storm. The boy is my son Mark and the garage was in the basement of our apartment building at the time. After a year of photographing in Miami with no set agenda that day I witnessed devastation I could not have imagined prior. The urgency of the situation became obvious and I set out to communicate my everyday experiences here with a clearer focus and in the most direct way: through a series of documentary style photographs that could appeal to a wide audience, inspire a dialogue, invite reflection on the phenomenon that is occurring right at this moment – not in some distant future, or in some faraway land, but here, in a dense urban landscape of a seemingly thriving city. The project has since expanded to the other southern states and up the East Coast of the US. It is ongoing.

Goodell, Jeff. The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World, 2017

Rush, Elizabeth. Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, 2018

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth, 2019

Ariza, Mario Alejandro. Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe, 2020

Groff, Lauren. Florida, 2018