What happens to a body that has learned to make itself invisible?
Overtime is a photobook about a football boarding school on Moscow's outskirts and its professional women's team. Over four years, the photographer — herself formed by early sport and the particular negotiations queerness requires — follows teenagers through discipline, belonging, and exposure: on the field, in the locker room, during informal gatherings. The project maps the survival strategies the game and the team make available. Off camera is a state that denies legal recognition, criminalizes queer visibility, and makes self-regulation a condition of safety.
Their daily life unfolds in a suburb where vegetation pushes through concrete and growing up happens inside a suffocatingly heteronormative environment. Football offers a bubble, but ideology is steadily narrowing what exists beyond it. The same bodies and gestures that pass inside become liabilities outside — camouflage is not chosen, it is learned. A collective identity forms through tattoos and sports brands, and "athlete" becomes a more navigable label than "feminist" or "pro-Western." The series ends with apples: first ripening, present and abundant, then lying discarded at the roadside.
2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Margo Ovcharenko
