In a time before tech: the Russian sisters living defiantly off the grid

Extract from The Guardian

Ludmila and Alevtina live in an ancient cabin, chopping logs, picking berries and covering anything electronic with a doily. Nadia Sablin’s shots of her indomitable aunties show a way of life splendidly untouched by progress

‘It’s hard to imagine they’ll one day be gone’ … the sisters complete a crossword in an image from the photobook Aunties. All photographs: Nadia Sablin

Sean O'Hagan

Saturday 7 November 2015 03.43 AEDT

In 1952, Nadia Sablin’s grandfather, Alexey, who had been badly wounded on the Russian front during the first world war, decided to return home to the village of Alyokhovshchina where he grew up.

“He took his house apart, log by log, a Roman numeral carved into each one, floated it down the Oyat river and reconstructed it,” writes Sablin in her photobook, Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila. It is there, more than 60 years later, that her book is set – in a rural world remarkably untouched by progress.

Sablin’s aunties, Alevtina and Ludmila, who are in their 70s, spend every summer in the house, repairing it by hand, working the fields around it, chopping wood for the fire and carrying water from the well. In the evenings they make soup and do crosswords or embroidery. A small TV set on which they watch Russian soaps is their only link to the world of technology and information.

“My father tries to pull his sisters into the present by buying them laptops and Kindles,” says Sablin, “but they bravely defy him by covering the offending objects with doilies and carrying on as before.”

Sablin, who was born in Russia but now lives in Brooklyn, started photographing her elderly aunties in 2008. She cites magic realist authors such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Gabriel García Márquez as influences, and indeed the intimate domestic world she evokes is both quotidian and luminous. Her portraits mainly show moments when the women have stopped for a breather, or are relaxing at night. They are so at ease with her camera that they even become willing collaborators in her more choreographed shots, in which she recreates scenes from her childhood.

“I can only see them the way I see them, and while I make no claim to objectivity, I do try to photograph everything they do with minimum interference,” she says. “But when I’m in the village, I don’t think I see reality objectively. There are too many childhood memories around – too many stories I read or made up, Fenimore Cooper novels I re-enacted in the woods, mermaids imagined in the streams and bog devils along the paths. It’s through this mist that I photograph my aunts’ everyday reality.”

That reality cannot but seem romantic to us, not least because it is so arrested in a lost time (the floral dresses and tablecloths, the lives free of relentless digital distraction) but also because they live simply amid bountiful nature – their apple trees are loaded with fruit and their meadow full of fennel and wild garlic. We see them hard at work, too, sawing wood they have carried from the sawmill. And we see the lines on their faces and feel their fragile sense of interdependency against the encroaching solitude of old age.

What shines through most strongly in the book is her admiration for these indomitable women. The book moves effortlessly from close observation of objects – two bowls of borscht on a faded tabletop, sheets drying in a shed – to intimate documentary – an aunt bent in concentration over a crossword – and from dark interiors to almost other-worldly daylight.

I first encountered Sablin’s work in 2013 when I put her forward for the Daylight Photography award, and was on the jury that chose her as the winner of the Firecracker award. She has since won the Centre for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book prize, which led to the making of Aunties.
“She chooses to show their way of living as almost enchanted; we can hardly believe that what we see in these pictures will ever disappear,” says the curator Sandra S Phillips, who selected Sablin for the first book prize. And yet the older, slower, more insular world that Alevtina and Ludmila represent is fading into history.

“Many rural people in Russia do live in similar conditions,” explains Sablin, “but most have embraced newer technology – and wardrobes. A chainsaw is the tool of choice, and weed-whackers long ago replaced scythes and sickles. Most of the villagers have installed plumbing and put in a washing machine. The neighbours do grow their own food, but since a supermarket was built, it’s cheaper to buy Polish potatoes and Bulgarian peppers than try to grow your own in sandy soil and with frequent heatwaves.”

Aunties is an elegy for a way of life as much as a loving homage to the women who embody it. “I know, of course, that everyone dies,” says Sablin, “but when I see my aunts looking the same, in the same house, doing the exact things I remember from decades ago, it’s hard to imagine they’ll one day be gone. But they will live a long time yet – they’re still quite young.”