IN THE COLD

Two years later I went to the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan to take photos of the Bartang valley and its inhabitants. I realised that I had to start here, from the roots. Because man is made up of earth and blood – his house and his parents. I lived in the valley for a month, moving from village to village, living in one house then another. I thought that it would take some time for me to find families that had been affected by migration. But it turned out that almost every household had a close relative that had gone to Russia in an attempt to earn money. The scale of migration exceeds any tangible limit.

Returning to Russia, I began to seek out and photograph the relatives and children of those I'd met in the Pamirs. This resulted in a double-sided narrative through which we can learn a little more about migrants from the beginning – see where they were born, how they grew up, who their parents are, what their children draw, what they believe and what they dream about.

Every day in the metro, in the bus, in the shop, in the courtyard, we are surrounded by people with similar faces, about whom we know nothing. Here in Russia, they get new names: Dima, Andrei, Misha – and begin calling themselves these even among themselves.

Behind this person who speaks bad Russian, believes in Allah and prays five times a day, there, in the mountains, stand his elderly parents; they fire a wood stove and cook chickpeas. The washing in the yard has been drying for three days, water dripping from it freezes. In the corner a six-year-old girl plays with a pink balloon, she's never seen her father because she was born here in the Pamirs. He's never seen his daughter because he works in Russia.