Biographie
Natalya Saprunova, originally from the Arctic region of Russia, on the Kola peninsula in Murmansk, is a documentary photographer based in Paris. During her graduate studies to become a French teacher in Russia, she worked as a photojournalist for the daily Murmansk Messenger. After her arrival in France in 2008, she studied and worked in Communication before leaving her permanent position eight years later to devote herself fully to photography.
Naturalized French and graduated in documentary photojournalism from the EMI-CFD school in Paris in 2020, Natalya develops an ethnographic approach around themes such as identity, environment, youth, femininity and spirituality.
Driven by a passion for transmission, she has been teaching photography since 2016 at the Graine de Photographe school in Paris and has supervised photo trips to Russia, notably to Saint Petersburg and Lake Baikal.
Présentation
Ouliana, 11, comes from a long line of Sámi reindeer herders whose traditions have nearly vanished. She lives in Lovozero, a village on the Kola Peninsula in Russia’s far north, near the Norwegian and Finnish borders. Towering brick apartment buildings were constructed there in the 1960s, but as early as the 1920s, Soviet authorities forcibly settled the nomadic Sámi communities scattered across the tundra, compelling them to work in collective farms (kolkhozes).
In the summer, the young girl travels alone by helicopter to visit her grandparents in Krasnoshchelye, where she reconnects with Sámi traditions and ways of life. Caught between modernity and heritage, between Soviet concrete and the endless tundra, Ouliana embodies a Sámi generation in transition.