Drugs — it doesn’t just hurt you, it hurts those around you too.
A photographer whose stark portrayal of a two-year-old girl’s life surrounded by her poverty-stricken parents life of drug and alcohol abuse has defended her decision not to report them to authorities.
Irina Popova’s photo-essay entitled Another Family sparked a national outrage when its portrayal of two St. Peterburg’s addicts seemingly oblivious to their daughter, Anfisa, was shared widely online.
Lilya and Pasha, parents to Anfisa were captured living a boisterous life of drug-fueled partying – while their daughter was allowed to wander to the ledge of an open window, play with their cigarettes and come face-to-face with her doped up father’s genitals while he slept-off his latest binge.
The photographs exhibited in St. Petersburg were nominated for awards but when the images made it online, they almost sparked an official police investigation and a campaign was started to get Anfisa away from her parents and put into an orphanage.
Anger was mostly directed towards Popova, who was 21 when she took the photographs in 2008, for not intervening.
Popova was labeled an opportunist for taking advantage of the drug-addicts and for not alerting anyone in a position of authority.
“I couldn’t imagine the reactions at all,” Popova said about the backlash against her.
“Maybe it’s weird, but my intention was to talk about the possibilities of love on the margins of society, and I hoped to bring more understanding, to build a bridge between people and to raise awareness that bringing up a child is not an easy task.”
She claimed that the negative reaction was startling to her, because she claims what is portrayed in the photographs were not the whole truth of Anfisa’s life. According to Popova, the startling images are just that and do no represent the ability of Pasha and Lilya to raise their daughter.
“The truth is that life is complex and there are many situations too complicated to be judged,” she said.
“I thought it was important to make people think more about the level of truth which they usually don’t want to think about.”
The project began when Popova traveled to St. Petersburg with the intention of creating a photographic essay about ‘feelings’.
After a failed attempt to capture what she wanted at a nightclub, she spotted a woman urinating in the street at 2.00am as she pushed her child along in a stroller.
The woman was Lilya and Popova asked if she could take photograph.
She ended up asking Popova is she wanted to come back to her apartment to take more pictures.
There Popova discovered a single room apartment that had a communal kitchen and bathroom. She moved in for two weeks and began taking pictures.
Popova witnessed the drugs and the booze and among all this, Anfisa crawling around, apparently left to her own devices.
Lilya and Pasha even came to the unveiling of the pictures at the St.Petersburg gallery before they caused such a commotion online.
Without access to the Internet, Popova felt she owed it to them to explain – especially after the police began asking her for their address. Pasha got angry at Popova because of the brush with the law and now refuses to speak to her.
Lilya was relaxed – but six months after the controversy in 2012 she disappeared – leaving Anfisa with her father.
She sought treatment for her addictions and is no longer with Pasha and works in a St. Petersburg clothe shop.
Pasha now works part-time as an electrician while he looks after his daughter with his new partner and her son. Anfisa is attending school and is still called princess by her father.
