Lise Sarfati

In this catalogue, Lise Sarfati introduces a world focused on adolescents in which the idea of abandonment, solitude and disappointment persists. It shows a series of portraits of young people shut up in reformatory schools of the Soviet Union and gives a detailed account of their fragile existence in a cold and decadent environment.\n \n \n \nWhen asked about this publication, Sarfati says: “The Russian series includes photographs taken in post-soviet Russia from 1994 to 2003. It is a mixture between landscapes into an abyss with characters from the interiors. The entire layout is composed to reflect interior dioramas showing Stalinist industrial zones such as Norilsk”.\n \n \n \nSarfati then effortlessly introduces young personages wandering around visceral landscapes while depicting there day to day encounters. The relationship between the devasted spaces combined with the characters creates a narrative quality. Sarfati calls her characters «personnages» as they remind her of personalities from a novel.\n \n \n \nThis way of photographing isolation was continued later by Sarfati in other series of adolescents portrayed in different places, most of them in the United States, and included in subsequent publications such as Austin, Texas o The New Life.