Russian photographer Fedor Shklyaruk investigates connections between places and memories through his photography practice. New Territory is a photo series reflecting peripheral areas of a modern metropolis, Moscow. This space is between two disprate realities: the urban and the wild. Without a fixed area, it is neither a sylvan rural environment nor a city as well. As big cities develop so do their boundaries — thus objects made from artificial materials, outdoors architecture and plexiglas fences appear in the images. “We live in the era of great cities. Some of them have transformed into agglomerations, like Greater Paris, Greater New York, Greater Tokyo. And Moscow is no exception with its population exceeding 12 million. But Moscow is a special case. In the middle of 2012, almost in an instant, the city area has doubled at the expense of fields, forests and poor suburbs. The goal of this project is to capture the moment when natural environment transforms into urban, to look into the city’s expanding skyline and try and imagine this big city’s future. Now it’s the part of Moscow — the new territory.”
The original version of this article first appeared on Thisispaper, a publishing partner of The Calvert Journal.