Kate Nolan: Neither, young women in Kaliningrad after 1991

Neither: young women in Kaliningrad

Neither is an exploration of the dreams and fears of young women in Kaliningrad, a small, isolated Russian region on the Baltic Sea. Its subjects are the first generation to have grown up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, working out an identity on what Nolan describes as a small island inside Europe. The women opened their homes to her over an extended period, and the project treats that access as the point rather than as a means to a set of pictures.

The geography carries the title. Formerly Königsberg, a major city of East Prussia, Kaliningrad became part of Russia only after the Second World War. During the Cold War its borders closed, and with the Soviet collapse in 1991 it was severed from the mainland altogether. It is now an exclave of Russia and an enclave of the European Union, which leaves it in the fragile position of being neither part of Big Russia nor truly part of Europe.

Nolan's method sets that political ambiguity against something more stable — the women who guided her through the region's stories. The fragility is in the place; the certainty is in the people, and the series works by keeping the two in the same frame.

Long-form work with subjects over time

Nolan is an Irish photographer specialising in extended photographic stories that examine the human condition. She works closely with her subjects over long periods and illustrates their circumstances through images and text together, which is why the projects read as collaborations conducted at the pace of the subject rather than the commission.

That method has an obvious cost — a project of this kind is measured in years — and it is precisely the kind of work that completion grants exist to finish, which is why Neither is a useful case for anyone reading this archive for practical reasons.

Awards, exhibitions and collaboration

Neither won the Alliance Française Photography Award in 2013, was shortlisted for the PhotoIreland Festival Portfolio Review Award in 2014, was selected for the 184th Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, and has been exhibited internationally.

Since 2013 Nolan has also worked on (its kind of like) telephone, a collaborative project between Irish and American women artists, which was exhibited at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia. The collaborative structure of that project sits alongside her documentary practice rather than apart from it: in both cases the work is assembled with other people over time instead of gathered from them.

One detail in the making of Neither deserves separating out. Nolan has described the women of Kaliningrad as having guided her through the region's stories, which inverts the usual arrangement in reportage from a closed or unfamiliar place. The photographer arrives without the language of the region's history; the subjects supply it; and the resulting series is organised around their account rather than around a correspondent's summary.

That is why the political framing in the work stays light. A project about an exclave could easily become an essay on Russian geopolitics with people used as illustration. Neither keeps the proportions the other way round.

The pairing of image and text in Nolan's practice also deserves a practical note, because it is a craft decision with consequences for how the work travels. A series built on photographs alone can be re-edited by every publication that runs it; a series in which the subjects' words are structural resists that kind of dismantling, since removing the text removes the argument. That makes the work harder to place in a conventional magazine spread and better suited to the book, the exhibition and the festival — which is, in practice, where Neither has lived. It is a trade every long-form documentary photographer makes knowingly or not: the more the form protects the subjects' account, the more the distribution has to be built for the form rather than borrowed from editorial.