‘We should all be living together’ Most patients in Russia’s residential psychoneurological institutions never see photographs of themselves. Oleg Klimov is changing that.

Between 2012 and 2014, photographer Oleg Klimov spent a total of three months in a residential psychoneurological institution (or, in Russian, a PNI). During that time, he took about 500 portraits of the PNI’s residents and learned about what life is like in some of Russia’s most closed-off, stigmatized institutions. Klimov stopped using knives and forks (only spoons were allowed in the PNI), saw a Russian Orthodox iconostasis stationed in a cafeteria, and made purchases from a store where no one ever uses cash (residents are never given their pensions in hand). While getting to know his neighbors and teaching them mathematics and photography, Klimov became convinced that the environment and the lifestyle available to any given person affects them at least as much as the individual traits they were born with.

Most PNI residents have never seen a photograph of themselves, whether on paper or on a screen. “It’s because someone at some point decided that it should be the norm to consider them so ugly and insane that even they don’t have the right to see themselves. I showed them their portraits, and the reaction was always the same: self-recognition and joy. We all lose our sanity when we lose our personal identity,” Klimov said. Even if there are “geniuses and insane people, beautiful people and ugly people, mentally ill people and people who feel completely healthy,” he said, we should all understand one another and live together.

The Russian edition of this article is part of Meduza’s MeduzaCare project, which is dedicating the month of February to coverage of PNIs.