The Brooklyn-based photographer Nadia Sablin has won the second annual Firecracker Award, which provides money to female photographers working on documentary projects. She was honored for a series called “Two Sisters,†about aunts of hers in a Russian village, where they live in ascetic fashion, chopping their own firewood, making their own clothes and cooking meals from scratch.
“They do everything by hand, and even the other villagers don't live like that any more,“ Ms. Sablin said in a telephone interview from her home in Bushwick. “You can't take away that they are my aunts and that I have childhood memories of that house, but I'd be doing this project even if they weren't my aunts. It's a vanishing way of life.â€
Ms. Sablin, 33, was born in what was then Leningrad and emigrated to the United States in 1992, settling with her parents in Cleveland. She studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, graduating in 2002, and received a master's degree from Arizona State University in 2011.
Her birth in Russia made her eligible for the $1,500 award, which is limited to women photographers born or working in Europe. She said she plans to continue shooting in Russia, but her current project is closer to home: it is also a study of two sisters, but they are young girls in New Jersey. “I photograph them once a year, and I've been doing it for seven years now,†she said.
