Maria Quigley: Babushka Svetlana and Me, one flat in St Petersburg

Babushka Svetlana and Me

Quigley made two trips to Russia, in September and December 2019, and set herself a formal constraint: every photograph would be made inside her grandmother's small apartment in St Petersburg. Within those walls she made portraits of her grandmother, her mother Svetlana and herself in various configurations, and documented the minutiae of daily routine — the furnishings, the food and pickles, the decor, and the television that is her grandmother's main connection to the outside world.

The apartment is the same one Quigley spent much of her early childhood in before moving to England, and it functions in the work as a time capsule. Her grandmother cared for her for the first four years of her life; returning as an adult, she is still treated as a child, and little appears to change between visits even when years pass. Since her grandfather's death a decade earlier, her grandmother's life has become increasingly isolated, and the routine of the flat reads as bleak and comforting at once — a duality Quigley has said she recognises rather than resolves.

The family history the project engages is specific. Her great-grandfather, a victim of Stalin's purges, was executed in the 1930s. Her grandmother was born at the start of the Second World War, suffered temporary blindness as a child and has permanent partial deafness as a result of it. Quigley was born in Russia in 1995 and came to Britain at four, after her mother fled a violent marriage.

Postmemory and inherited trauma

The theoretical interest Quigley names is postmemory — the ways family trauma may be transmitted across generations — together with the question of how people construct and project onto their own pasts. Her stated intention is to place female narratives, so often neglected, at the centre of the work, and to let the lives of three ordinary women carry something about the bonds of love and history that connect generations of women elsewhere.

She has been candid that the project raised more questions than it answered, describing it as the beginning of a long road that can only be partly photographic. She has also described the initial reaction of her subjects — why us, what is interesting about us, would you not rather photograph something more interesting — and their attitude to the history itself as a kind of stoicism: this happened, be glad you are alive, keep going. They were proud to see the work published and came to understand it better afterwards.

Her mother occupies an unusual position in the project: an artist herself, halfway between photographer and grandmother, both part of the story and a supportive creative voice in the making of it. Quigley has described the emotional range of the shoot as running from melancholy, fear and trepidation through to comfort, joy and relief, and has noted the irony of documenting one woman's isolation shortly before the whole world entered a version of the same condition.

Training, collective and collaborations

Born in St Petersburg in 1995, Quigley moved to London with her mother in 2000. She studied at North West Kent College, completing a BTEC in graphics and illustration, and holds a BA in graphic design from Brighton University, where she began establishing herself as a freelance photographer in her final year.

She is part of the OneFive photographers' collective, which works on joint projects and runs workshops for young people. In November 2018 she took part in a five-week intensive course with Magnum Photos, and the resulting work was exhibited at Protein Space that December.

In 2016 she was shortlisted for Brighton University's annual printmaking award, came second in Calumet Photographic's Student Photographer of the Year, and received an honourable mention in the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. She has since worked closely with the photographer Gideon Mendel and the designer Stu Smith at GOST Books on the publication Freedom or Death, and collaborated with Mendel and the filmmaker Mo Stoebe on Through Positive Eyes.