NEW YORK TIMES: Captions and Co-Authorship for a Photo Essay


Editorial Collaboration
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Commissioned by award-winning photojournalist Misha Friedman, this NYT-featured essay documents corruption and historical erasure across Russia. I was brought in to co-author the essay and write all 13 captions featured in the original publication.

Each caption was written under tight spatial and tonal constraints, grounding the image in political and historical context, while maintaining restraint and precision. The language had to carry weight without distortion, while staying in harmony with the mood and composition of each image.

Selected Captions

Four of the 13 captions featured in the Times.

Moscow Street, 2012
A young man beats a woman on a Moscow street, while police and bystanders look on without intervening. Moscow’s Anna National Center for the Prevention of Violence reported in 2012 that a third of Russian women suffer domestic violence and that it kills as many as 14,000 of them each year—around four times more per capita than in the United States.

Victory Day, Karelia
In the Russian Republic of Karelia, a family celebrates May 9th—WWII Victory Day—as their patriarch, a one-legged amputee, watches from the car. The nearby monument reads, “No one is Forgotten. Nothing is Forgotten.” While this phrase has become a national post-war slogan, in reality the extraordinary number of MIA’s has never been officially acknowledged.

Gas Line, Urals
A gas line elevated above a street in a village in the Urals. Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, and yet half the country’s population has no gas lines. Most villages lack not only gas, but also running water, with people living not very differently than a hundred years ago.

Abandoned Mosque, Muslyumovo
A window of an abandoned mosque in the village of Muslyumovo. This village was on the banks of the Techa River in Russia’s Ural Mountains, which for many years was a dumping ground for lethal radioactive waste from the Mayak nuclear complex.


Role
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Caption writer and editorial collaborator
Commissioned by Misha Friedman
Published by The New York Times