Student Photo Exhibition: Bāba, Babushka.

Photographs by Dasha Bough (‘21) and Sky Russell (‘20), with the generous help of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

It is a collection of images captured in different places at the same time.

Dasha spent the summer of 2019 in Volgograd, Russia to film a documentary following the life of a babushka named Galiya. Sky spent the same summer in Tenryu-mura, a rapidly aging rural hamlet in central Japan, photographing the day-to-days of the bābas (grandmas) and jījis (grandpas) she met there.

The images and text, taken together, paint a picture of the colorful lives being lived in two very different corners of the world. While the stories are each unique and the settings vastly disparate, what the snapshots share is the hushed beauty, unassuming poetry, and outrageous humor found in the mundane. This is an exhibition made with love, dedicated to the people and places we had the honor of visiting.