STROOMI RAND
Stroomi rand. Strange positions and other stories of a working beach Estonia
A beach in the suburbs of Tallinn, not the one you can find on a postcard. A popular, dedicated to ordinary people and workers. The beach is surrounded: not so far behind, the cloned workers' buildings in a row inherited from the communist era; on the western front, the middle and upper class quarter with closed communities and private houses with gardens; in the east, the commercial and industrial port where abandoned warehouses, industrial wasteland and business area mingle.
Here in Stroomi rand (Stroomi beach), there is a kind of Russian flavor floating in the air: we talk, we eat Russian and we even sunbathe in the Russian style. Time had almost stopped and the atmosphere is sometimes unreal but often anachronistic. Those who want a «hype» beach go elsewhere, the fall of the Berlin Wall is far now, the Russian relics represent the past and most of the «fashionable» young Estonians are moving away from Stroomi.
In Estonia, summers are short and winter too long. Sunbathing looks like a quest but anuway is as if time passes slowly, motionless despite the changes that began since 1991 and after with the entry into the European Union. You can focus on very small things in this small society that stand out from the story of a lifetime. A microcosm that bears witness to a vestige of a country.
Taken separately from the collection, each image is a scene, a story, a tale that I told myself. All the work is taken on the fly, almost every day during my stay, as if I had shared these moments with them. The frame is big, the lines are as simple as the subjects – too simplistic? – but here is Stroomi: an obsolete simplicity, a feeling that brings me out of this era of consumerism and globalization.
