Party like a Moscow EXHIBITION Oliv Pizza 🍕
“If you have a hunchback, sprinkle it with glitter and go dance” © Party Monster, 2003.
From 2022 to 2023, I spent every weekend shooting Moscow’s nightlife parties.
Over that time, I accumulated more than 3,500 portraits of nightclub visitors.
The dance floor is sexuality, body language, dance, light, social interaction, and unity. It’s subcultural ideas and fantasies about an alternative reality, a better life in the moment.
My subject is a character beyond gender, age, and status. The only thing that defines them: they chose to be here and now, at the party.
Some people I shot once and never saw again.
Others appeared in my frame again and again — they recognized me, said hello, asked me to capture them, and posed willingly. I photographed stars, bloggers, DJs, as well as club staff — I loved how they all blended together in one space. It seemed as though any hierarchies were erased here. Everyone was equal. And the outside world seemed to freeze, to cease to exist.
“Costume” can be seen as a kind of social mask, camouflage. It gives my subjects confidence and freedom, while simultaneously making them indistinguishable in the crowd. They are so bright that they merge into a motley collage, turning into a pattern. The layering of color spots, angles, and geometries creates a feeling of fractured reality, reassembled in a new order. The image of the crowd and the image of the individual merge into one.
Through my subjects, I explore not only the archaeology of contemporary glamour. It’s important for me to understand what unites them.
What are these parties to us? A thirst for self-expression? Those famous “15 minutes of fame”? Or, on the contrary, a place of escapism where one can forget and unwind? A fusion with the music? Why do we have fun, starting from “primitive” times?
This book is a collection of sketches from the lives of my friends and strangers against the backdrop of a big city. I tried to show Moscow through those who surrounded me in the epicenter of nightlife. In my view, this is a kind of cast of the times and a collective portrait.
