Features

Punks not dead

Julia Lisnyak

Published on 07/08/13

© Julia Lisnyak

I was a teen­ager in USSR, the coun­try of com­mun­ism, cen­sor­ship and lim­its of all kinds.
Today we live in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, but  Rus­sian soci­ety seem to be on a way of zero tol­er­ance to any diversity. “Being a punk means pain and suf­fer­ing”- says 17 year Old punk Lina. Well, I wouldn’t agree. Being  punk means being young, and have internal free­dom to express yourself.

I am a mother of two and  I  pho­to­graph punks. I have a lot of punk friends and I am fas­cin­ated by this sub­cul­ture. Vivid and boldly brave, punks could have been my tribe when I was a teen­ager. It still came as a sur­prise when my 13 year old daugh­ter has become punk for two years. She was imme­di­ately thrown away from her school and it took a while to find another one where they wouldn’t demand to ” put her looks in order”.

For the last few years I have been fol­low­ing the punk com­munity in St.Petersburg. One would say that punks look the same every­where, but in today’s Rus­sia being dif­fer­ent in any way takes a lot of cour­age. Unfor­tu­nately, recently St.Petersburg has become  a cen­ter of  this bigotry.

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