There was a station I used to pass every day on my way home in my first months in Moscow. It was completely unremarkable, grey and concrete. I would sometimes need to get off there if the train I was on was being diverted to a very short, three-stations-long light blue line. Kashirskaya is the last – or the first – stop on that line. Hence, one day, I got off there completely on purpose, and photographed life that was unfolding in front of me:
Kashirskaya was named after a road it’s on, Kashirskoye shosse. It is a big resitential district, with plenty of huge, brutalistic blocks of flats. In 1999, one of them was a target of one of the terrorist attacks that started the Second Chechen War. According to Alexander Litvinenko and the evidence summarised in his book, the terrorist attacks were staged by the Federal Security Service to influence the result of the subsequent election. Blocks of flats were blown up in a few cities in Russia, the war broke out and, as a result, Vladimir Putin rose to – now almost absolute – power. This is all I could think of as I was stepping out of the underground. The sky was steel- grey. It was a neighbourhood like any other this far from the centre. People, as usual, were walking with their heads down, minding their own business. Why did someone choose that street? To a certain extent, this is the birthplace of the current regime:
This is a little throwback to Moscow – expect more of these, I have plenty of material left. In the meantime, you can find me somewhat more often on facebook and instagram. And now – off we go, forwards, to all the wanders Mexico has to offer!