Relatives

Maria Trofimova

2015

Relatives is a book of short photographic stories inspired by visits to my relatives in Russia and Ukraine. Essentially it’s about that very position of being a relative rather than the actual places and people. To be both an insider and outsider offers a particular point of view on the surroundings, the textures, the relationships, the events, etc. where the mundane and the extraordinary are temporarily re-defined. My intention was to play with different photographic languages: from the glamour to the vernacular, to the super-ordinary and the cliché. Each story offers a different tone to reflect this dense and awkward stream sensations and impressions that occurs when I get to travel (always briefly) through the “familiar foreign”.