There will be no winter

November, December, January, February, March, April – I’ve survived another half year of cold, dark days and nights. It is difficult to wake up, to do something, I do not want to meet people, and I have no energy for intimacy. Everything freezes and the only thing I can hear is how electricity reels in circles without interruption.

This story started out as a diary project in 2016. There will be no winter is the experience of this period, the frustration of my life. In St. Petersburg, where the proximity to the north mercilessly reduces the daylight hours almost to nil, this melancholy is felt more intensely. Every film I shot, every day I spent in the printing lab, brought me closer to the spring.

I used only three colors – black, white, red – and some drafts for manual printing of photographs. On the photo paper one part of the image reveals the gradation from light to dark and vice versa. This evolution of light is like a movement, like experiencing a winter-spring distance. And every time I live through one more nil to get closer to the light.

Varya Kozhevnikova (1988) is a Russian visual artist and photographer who has studied at the Academy of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism in St. Petersburg.