One-night only screening & talk

Tuesday, July 10, 2018. 7 PM

Moderated by photographer Annie Ling

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The Village is a series I have been photographing for the last decade. It centers on the tiny town, where I spent many summers documenting the lives of my elderly aunties. I have formed relationships with several local families, returning again and again to hear their stories, photograph them in celebration and at work. I have seen the town change over the years, old wooden houses sinking into the earth, replaced by apartment blocks built by migrant laborers.  Russia’s economical and political changes have a direct effect on the villagers, pushing them to adopt new realities, develop ways of survival and depend on one another in powerful, profound ways.

This series is geographically limited, but the questions I am addressing with it are universal – what it’s like to grow up in a time of economic and ideological upheaval, how state propaganda skews our perception of reality, how communities deal with their most underprivileged members, how children change as they grow older and how women become self-sufficient as their husbands are claimed by faraway jobs, illness, and alcoholism.

~ Nadia Sablin

NADIA SABLIN (b. Russia, 1980) earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 and an MFA from Arizona State University in 2011.  Her work investigates the relationship between documentary and fictional storytelling and explores the larger world through close personal narratives.  Her ongoing projects are primarily based in rural Russia and Ukraine, spanning years of children growing up, elders growing old and the practical ways in which people cope with the passage of time in an unstable economic environment.

She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell colony, Firecracker, the Puffin Foundation, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Her work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Moscow Times, Slate, The New Yorker, American Photo, and the Financial Times. Nadia Sablin’s photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Bellevue College in Washington, and Texas Women’s University School of Art among others. Her first monograph, Aunties, was published by Duke University Press/CDS in 2015. She teaches photography at SUNY New Paltz.