photo at 12

I use photography as a tool. It helped me adapt to a new community in Switzerland after moving from Russia. It helped me convince my husband to have children. For the past ten years, I have used photography as a tool to communicate with my father, who lives in Rostov-on-Don. We don’t speak much on the phone. Instead, every day at twelve o’clock, my father takes a photograph and sends it to me via WhatsApp. I do the same. Today. Tomorrow. My father shows me his new projects: he digs holes, prepares breakfast, repairs the house. He shows me my mother, my grandmother. He shows me his cats and dogs. He shows me himself. Without words, he tells me that he cares about me. In return, I show him fragments of my life — the life of his grown-up daughter and her family. Our WhatsApp chat history resembles an endless picture gallery. The archive now contains around 8,000 photographs. What sounds like a lot is, at the same time, very little. These are short snapshots, lasting only a few seconds, of the twenty-four hours of a day that a father and a daughter allow each other to see. As an author, I push the idea of communication through images with a loved one to an extreme. Almost all of my communication with my father is based on photographs, and it has been this way for many years. As a result, an archive has emerged — a visual document of ten years of two lives. This archive is special because every image is addressed to one person only. Looking back, I see a portrait of contemporary digital communication: two close but separate people, living in different worlds, caring for each other and trying to stay connected through simple, direct images, because other forms of communication hardly work.