Whenever I start digging around in my hard drives I find something that reminds me of someone and somewhere from ages ago. This is an old friend of mine from Moscow that I used to photograph a lot. The photo was taken outside the dacha my friends and I used to rent every summer on the outskirts of Moscow. It was part of a fashion shoot for Russian Playboy that was used as inspiration for a Selfridge’s London advertising shoot I did a few years later. I used to do a lot of street casting when I lived and worked in Russia. I loved shooting “real people” versus models because they always added something to the images that made them feel like more than just fashion shoots and a little like historical records of Russia at a certain time. I guess a lot of the street style photography that is done these days has a similar vibe. This was shot on film with my vintage Rollieflex camera, I think it was 2003, and of course nothing was retouched.
