Shooting with an iPhone, says French photographer Frédéric Noy, is like “mild psychotherapy. Sometimes, you get stuck. Taking a few pictures with an iPhone is like a liberation. A reset, a moment of reflection. You see things differently.”
Noy arrived in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, mid-pandemic, after many years in Africa, where he had documented the daily lives of persecuted LGBTQ+ Ugandans; he had won World Press Photo and Visa d’Or awards for his work on the environmental disaster in Lake Victoria. “I wanted to go somewhere as distant and as different as possible,” he says. “Kazakhstan was the last country to leave the USSR, and it’s still constructing its identity. That’s what interested me. All I knew about it was cliche.”
He took this photo in early May 2021, when, on the last day of term, pupils, their teachers and some parents placed flowers on the statue of Aliya Moldagulova, a Kazakh-born sniper who died of battle wounds in 1944 and was made a hero of the Soviet Union.
“Like Russia, they celebrate Victory Day here on 9 May,” Noy says. “The shot intrigues me because the children’s uniforms look almost like the Red Army. In a country that only became independent in 1991, when the Kazakhs were a minority in their homeland, there’s a clear tension between the national and the Soviet identity.”
It’s part of what he calls his project scrapbook. “I rarely take the same pictures with my phone and with my cameras,” he says. “The intention is very different. It’s like a sketch, I suppose. I feel sometimes I’m not the same photographer.”
• The headline and text of this article were amended on 31 January 2022. An earlier version said that the children were wearing “school uniforms”; the outfits were special uniforms worn for Victory Day.
