Backs

The LOMO "Backs" series returns to mid-1980s Moscow and its suburbs, where I photographed people from behind with a LOMO-compact-automat — a plastic toy camera loaded with black-and-white film. Turned away from the lens, my subjects become anonymous figures against queues, courtyards, and grey apartment blocks, their coats and postures carrying the weight of the era. With no faces to read, the eye settles on gesture and setting: the tilt of a shoulder, a shopping bag, the light falling across a Soviet street. These backs are portraits of a time and place as much as of the people who lived in it.