Artist’s reception and book signing: Tuesday, November 17th from 5 PM – 7 PM

Nadia Sablin, a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, was chosen by renowned curator and historian Sandra S. Phillips to win the seventh biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her color photographs that document, as she writes, “the lives of my aunts who live in Northwest Russia. 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.”

“In 1952, my grandfather began to lose his vision as a result of being wounded in World War II,” Sablin writes. “Wanting to return to the place where he grew up, he found an unoccupied hill in a village north of St. Petersburg, close to his brothers, sisters, and cousins. He took his house apart, log by log, and floated it down the Oyat River to its new location and reconstructed it. More than sixty years later, this house is still occupied by my aunts in the warmer months. The two women, who never married, have relied on each other for support and companionship their entire lives. I have been spending my summers in the village, photographing my aunts’ routines and quiet occupations, and the small world that surrounds them. Leaving and returning again divides our time into chapters, as the narrative moves forward.”

Nadia Sablin, a native of Russia, earned a B.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University in 2011. A freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, Sablin’s work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Moscow Times, Slate, American Photo, the Calvert Journal, and the New Yorker. Sablin has received the Firecracker Photographic Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Grant, Peter S. Reed Foundation grant and was named one of the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers. Sablin’s photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the U.S., including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and Texas Women’s University School of Art.