Claudine Doury — À propos — Slash Paris

« I have so far photographed many young girls, expression through them my childhood and teenage years. In this work , the few male presences always acted as extras. I am now exploring manhood in a period of transition at the end of adolescence. When and how does a boy become a man? What are the signs of this transformation? How is it different from previous generations? Questioning manhood in transition to adulthood, I raise the concepts of gender and otherness at the start of the 21st century.I shot that series in St. Petersburg, where a new generation of Russians arises. These young men were born when the Soviet Union collapsed.These young Russians are sons of the new middle class workers, they are twenty years old and they are the antithesis of their elders : they come from all corners of Russia and chose St. Petersburg as a place to start their new lives. They are at odds with the inertia of Russia, they are modern, open to art and culture, connected with the rest of the planet, and they reshuffle the codes of a moving world. My previous work about young Russian girls has taught me a lot about Russia. This new series is about these young Russian men in a fast changing society, where manhood, virility and self-image revisits the traditional vision of genders.This new «modern man» in the process of emerging over there is a witness to the changes of our times and I know that I can find evidence and traces of these changes.»