Natalia Kopkina: Mame

When finishing her series of photographs about Russia in 2015, Russian born Kopkina discovered in her grandfather’s storage a carefully handwritten booklet with over a hundred poems by unknown poet Boris Fileikin. Kopkina’s grandfather and Fileikin had become friends during their encampment in a Siberian coal mine during the war in the 1940s. Kopkina was impressed by Fileikin’s melancholic poems that spread over 5 decades, from the 1940s to 1980s. They seemed to reflect the same Russian soul that she also dealt with in her photographs taken in 2006-2015 of her childhood home in Russia. This led to the idea of combining photographs and Fileikin’s poems, which he was not able to publish during his lifetime. The hand bound book Mame (To Mother) is in Russian and contains an English translation as a separate appendix.

Mame is a Finnish Photobook Award 2019 finalist.