“Unbewitched is about the act of conjuring a fairytale reality around yourself – constructing myths and fleeing from fear and pain into a dream,” says Kristina Rozhkova, whose latest project traces five years of life in Russia and what followed after she left. Within Unbewitched, this fantasy is undercut by what she describes as “the breaking of the spell – a moment of disillusionment, the removal of the blindfold, a collision with reality.” Here, Rozhkova captures friends and acquaintances who, like her, are reckoning with the foundations of their new reality.

The work draws heavily on themes of fantasy and dislocation, an aesthetic that the photographer says is necessary to latch onto in response to contemporary life. “The reality for young, creative people in Russia who dissent from the regime is bleak, if not outright dangerous,” she explains. “By shielding ourselves from these horrors, we invent new worlds.”

The draw to fantasy is one the photographer has felt long before she picked up a camera. Bullied throughout school and labelled “strange”, Rozhkova retreated inward, first into literature, then philosophy, until eventually finding photography as a medium to play with reality. “Perhaps that was the turning point – turning toward fantasy to look away from human cruelty.”

In this way, many of the images are staged by the photographer herself. Subjects are shown coated in mud, contorted into strange poses, or caught in embrace. In one image, a body disappears beneath clusters of translucent toad eggs. “The dressing up and role-playing during my shoots is an opportunity to adjust reality,” she reflects, describing an approach that searches for “strange poses, uncomfortable situations, and unexpected details.”

While this staging could easily be read as theatrical, the emotional reality beneath it remains grounded in the lives of young Russians living through political instability. Many of the people photographed throughout the book are Rozhkova’s friends and acquaintances. “The war with Ukraine and the relentless repressions against artists and the LGBTQ+ community in Russia forced many to abandon their homes, families, and jobs for a life in exile,” she explains. While some friends have disappeared entirely into isolation, others appear in images taken in an abandoned village where they now live off-grid, “fishing, gathering mushrooms, self-sustaining just to avoid returning to city life.”

Shortly before the book’s release, Rozhkova fled the country after spending two years under criminal prosecution related to her artistic practice. Now living outside Russia for the first time, she describes an unfamiliar sense of relief. “For the past two years, living under criminal prosecution, I was in a state of constant terror,” she says. “I’d walk down the street expecting to be snatched up again. Now, the clouds have cleared. My mind is sharper. There’s this unusual sense of freedom.”

This co-existence of discomfort threads throughout the project, a fixation that Rozhkova deliberately leans into. “I believe discomfort is essential in art,” she explains. “Society is obsessed with comfort and pleasure, but comfortable days are unremarkable.” Instead, she searches for images that sit between beauty and grotesquery, pulling viewers towards what might initially repel them. “We are naturally drawn to the monstrous and the ‘dirty’. Ugliness becomes desirable.”

At times, this discomfort emerges through recurring motifs of animals within the project. “Since birth, I communicated more with dogs than with people; my friends and toys were the dogs.” She continues: “The animal world has always been more compelling to me than the human one. I tend to explain humanity through animalistic lenses and vice versa. To me, modern society and civilisation are a dead end; I see nothing beautiful in it.”

While Unbewitched pulls from other worlds, there is an anchor of realism that comes with its creation. “This book is a definitive point of no return,” she says. “It’s a record of a complex, destructive period. It’s a way to preserve what is already breaking, knowing life will never be the same. It’s an attempt to preserve what is slipping away – or what has already vanished.”

Unbewitched is published by United Vagabonds and available to purchase online here