Isolated but not alone

In October 2022, Stimultania contacted the ANTENNE association to imagine a creative project with photographer Natalya Saprunova. During the meeting with the participants, the artist proposes a series of photographs as a starting point for the project.

One of the images, taken from the series Saami, we lived in the tundra, challenges the five men present that day. The reactions follow.

For one, the image is a memory of Sudan with the mosquito net that surrounds the bed, for the other an image full of calm and serenity that reminds him of his fishing trips, for another still a testimony of the transmission between generations. 

They finally evoke the loneliness of this woman. And yet, Meddy specifies “isolated but not alone”. This sentence becomes the starting point of the project they are going to carry out with the photographer.

For a week, the participants will thus recount the moments of voluntary solitude, but also the strength of certain moments shared despite the isolation that their situation can sometimes entail. The images produced reveal this ambivalence, the light is everywhere like a hyphen between the stories.

Serenity slips into the photographs during a fishing trip.

Native to Arctic Russia on the Kola Peninsula, Natalya Saprunova is a documentary photographer and member of the Zeppelin agency. During her graduate studies as a French teacher in Russia, she worked as a photojournalist for the daily Le Messenger in Murmansk.

Naturalized French and graduated from the school of information professions EMI-CFD in the spring of 2020, she continues to explore the issues of modern society related to identity, youth, integration, femininity and spirituality.

In addition, being passionate about the transmission of knowledge, she has been giving photography lessons at the Graine de Photographe school since the end of 2016. Natalya has also accompanied photo trips in Russia to Saint-Petersburg and Lake Baikal.