Fish/Pearce Award Winner
Nadia Sablin (born 1980, Russia; lives New York) earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA from Arizona State University, Phoenix. She has received grants and fellowships from Firecracker; Guggenheim Foundation; Foundation for the Arts; MacDowell Colony; Peter S. Reed Foundation; and Puffin Foundation. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Moscow Times, Slate, The New Yorker, American Photo, and The Financial Times. She has had solo and group exhibitions across the US, including at Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA; Cleveland Museum of Art; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Print Center, both Philadelphia; and Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR. As a recipient of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography, Sablin’s first monograph Aunties was published by Duke University Press/CDS in 2015. She teaches photography at State University of New York at New Paltz.
Statement from the Artist:
Her work investigates the relationship between documentary and fictional storytelling and explores the larger world through close personal narratives. Her ongoing projects primarily based in rural Russia span years. They capture children growing up, elders growing old and the practical ways in which people cope with the passage of time in an unstable economic environment.
A Closer Look at Epiphany, 2019
Using the tropes of documentary photography and narrative fiction, Nadia Sablin’s images of everyday life in rural Russia and Ukraine touch upon universal experiences. Her work chronicles the socio-economic changes across generations in these fledgling post-Soviet nations. This photo from the series “Years Like Water” is of two members of the Vysotskiye family, who live in the village of Alekhovshchina. With her back to the camera, the mother looks on as her daughter dunks herself into an icy pool. This ritual marks the Russian Orthodox celebration of the Epiphany on January 19th.