2014 CDS / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography Winner
Nadia Sablin
Aunties
Brooklyn-based photographer Nadia Sablin was chosen by renowned curator and historian Sandra S. Phillips as the seventh Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography winner for her color photographs that document, as she writes, "the lives of my aunts who live in Northwest Russia."
Sablin, who was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and moved to the United States as a child, spent seven summers documenting her aunts' self-sustaining, highly regimented daily life. Alevtina and Ludmila are in their seventies but carry on the traditional Russian way of life, chopping wood for heating the house, bringing water from the well, planting potatoes, and making their own clothes. Together, they maintain the house built by their father in the early nineteen-hundreds.