Cargó

Immigrant experience is not particularly misunderstood, it is rather unrecognized. It is shaped by and hidden in the blind weight of the opposing principles which comprise it – collision of the old and new world, social with personal, empathy with intellection, immemorial with factual remembrance of things.
This project, entitled Cargó, derives from my personal experience of immigrating from the former Soviet Union and settling in the United States.
Rather than illustrating the immigrant experience, this project aims to be closer to the moments of poetry than to a photo-journalistic epic by looking into moments of life, things that come from internal visions, and portraying social reality as an enigma. It explores immigrant experience and psyche strictly by means of visual poetic reasoning, uncovering layers that are not on the surface and painting a portrait of a community of memory and image.
As if packed and stored in a piece of luggage, the images collectively represent layers of memory – the memorial, the immemorial, and the everyday. The luggage (Cargó) is the repository of our intimate, and yet collective being.

Cargó has been conceived upon completion of my first monograph entitled “Past Perfect Continuous”, published by Red Hook Editions in 2017, that deals with the idea of return to homeland, thus is a second major project that uses my personal experience as the starting basis for the work.
It is shot primarily, but not limited to, in the communities of immigrants from the former Soviet republics in North America.