Metropolis

photographs and text by
Ivan Mikhaylov

Moscow is a vast city of busy people, traffic jams, a noisy subway, aggressive advertising, street lights, expensive shop windows and quiet loneliness.

Like a huge teeming anthill where the inhabitants carry out their everyday functions like cogs in a machine.

The subjects of my photographs are young people who left the provinces and moved to the capital for diverse reasons. For them that means new surroundings, a different rhythm and different rules of behaviour.

Some feel in their element here, others are oppressed and overwhelmed by the megalopolis.

I met them and put the same questions I ask myself. What do they want from the city? What are their thoughts and dreams, what do they hope for, how do they feel in this environment?

— Ivan Mikhaylov