The photographer Nadia Sablin left her home in St Petersburg in 1992 when she was 12 years old and moved with her family to the US. Sixteen years later, she returned to the city she grew up in, and to the village of Alekhovschina, where she had spent her childhood summers with her aunts. That six-hour rural ride to an older Russia, and to the house her grandfather had built, returned Sablin to the magic of her past. “The house smelled of pine cones burning in the samovar and my aunty’s blintzes.”
Over the following decade, she returned to Alekhovschina every summer, entranced in particular by the children of families who lived there, who played in the same rivers and forests that she had done, like characters in a half-remembered fairytale. Sablin’s pictures from the village, collected in a new book, Years Like Water, capture that return. They view a world that has hardly been touched by modernity, through a child’s eyes, the child she had been.
