Goodbye My Chechnya is a personal account of a place I came to know through the young women who let me into their lives, and of a society changing before my eyes.

I was 21 when I first arrived in Chechnya. A year later, I moved to Grozny. I thought I had come to document a society recovering from war. Instead, I found myself witnessing another kind of transformation:
quieter, more intimate, unfolding in the everyday lives of the people I met.

When I first arrived, many of the girls I photographed wore miniskirts and left their hair uncovered. By my last shoot, teenage girls were attending gym class in hijabs, long skirts and long sleeves. The change had happened so quickly that, looking back, it was difficult to pinpoint exactly when one world had begun to give way to another.

For young women, even the smallest acts of independence could carry consequences. A girl caught smoking risked arrest. Rumours of a relationship before marriage could expose her to violence, even honour killings. Beneath the surface of everyday life, the boundaries of what a woman could do, wear or become were being redrawn.

Over time, the girls I photographed became my friends. I grew close to them, and what had begun as a documentary assignment became something much more personal. Through their lives, I came to understand the pressures of growing up in a society where religion, tradition and state power were reshaping not only public life, but also the most private parts of being young.

Goodbye My Chechnya is my attempt to hold on to that time: to the young women I knew, the lives they were navigating, and the world I watched change around them.
It is a portrait of a generation coming of age, and a farewell to a place that, by the time I left, had become very different from the one I first arrived in.

2011–2012