This is a series of photos about the village where I grew up. I started working on this series in 2019. I was capturing in photos the area that I had known since childhood, the life of our family. It wasn't until some time later that this series took shape into something coherent and meaningful to me - I tried to make sense of what home means to me. Probably many of us have to face this kind of reflection at certain points in our lives. In our youth, drawn by the new and unknown, we often dream of leaving home as soon as possible, finding our surroundings tedious. And it seems that it is only with age that one comes to understand how important it is to have a place that can be identified as home, finally accepting it in a completely honest manner, realizing also the underside of this sometimes heavy connection with all the imperfections of the surrounding reality. I am in this context no exception at all. Accepting this interconnectedness has inspired me and allowed me to look at things long familiar to the eye with renewed interest.
This is a small village in the South of St. Petersburg, Russia. I find a lot of space and beauty there, but of course what makes this place special is the relationship between the person and the environment in which you happen to spend most of your conscious years, which has also participated in your formation. The influence seems to be a reciprocal process. We sprout like trees, putting down roots, ourselves wrapped more and more tightly in memories, alone and together with our loved ones, becoming part of the landscape. We find traces of our surroundings, leaving our own traces around us.
Daria Piskareva was born in St. Petersburg. In 2011 she graduated from the university and got a degree in economics. In 2020 she won a grant to study at the school of contemporary photography Docdocdoc and in 2021 she finished the course Experiments in Contemporary Photography. Currently she works as an accountant and at the same time continues her personal photography projects. Daia lives in St. Petersburg, Russia.