Hundreds of thousands Russian people feel they do not belong to their bodies. But happiness of gender reassignment is not available for all of them. An American photographer Liz Safrati took amazing photos back in the 1990s featuring men who underwent gender reassignment surgeries to become women. “A fluent Russian speaker, Sarfati focused in this body of work on a kind of brutal “bohemia,” and the intensity of life in the midst of post-Soviet decay.Sarfati has a capacity for shifting her photographic antennae and adopting multiple understandings of a place and its society. This was proven in her Russian imagery, as it is in her new series made in the United States, which is featured in these pages. Her work plays an important part in today’s debates about the uses and visual languages of socially engaged photography, in that Sarfati stubbornly resists “objectifying” the subjects that she is compelled to photograph. Her sense of curiosity is profoundly intuitive, and profoundly human. While we are used to viewing photographs of such subjects-including the legacy of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as the leitmotif that American youth can offer on the state of U.S. society-Sarfati consciously undermines any desire for or expectation of a single or defining perspective upon complex social ideas. Her photographs are much more concerned with activating within us a connection-via aesthetics and the intensity of her encounters with her subjects-with our world on a much more immediate and less quasi-informational way”- Charlotte Cotton. For more information we invite you to visit the link below.
