The Home, The Field and The Flux
It’s difficult to find someone in Uzbekistan who doesn’t have some connection to agriculture and especially cotton. For centuries, people have been figuring out ways to bring water even to the driest parts of the steppe. Later, the Russian Empire, and then the USSR, implemented irrigation projects to capitalize on cotton, which led to an ecological disaster — the shrinking of the Aral Sea. Today, workers massively migrate across the country to rent fields as independent seasonal farmers, while others are employed in cotton picking by giant businesses close to the government.
In my family, cotton was present across multiple generations and at different levels of the labor hierarchy. My mother picked cotton as a child, student, factory worker, while my grandmother held a managerial position and was implicated in the so-called ‘cotton affair’ in the 1980s.
My grandfather was an amateur photographer and photographed people working in cotton fields, among other subjects. This creates a parallel with my practice separated by approximately fifty years. He passed away long time ago, but cotton production continues to exist. It is also interesting that during the Soviet period, photographer would visit cotton fields to photograph workers and sell printed photographs to them.
By 2025, the total area of cotton fields has slightly decreased, and an increasing share of cotton harvesting is carried out by machines rather than manual labor.
Publications:
It's Nice That
Nowness Asia
East East
Safelight Paper / Figures Photography
Wül Magazine