This photography project is about people who went missing a few years ago and are still not found. They disappeared not because of military actions or natural disasters. Once they just went out of their homes and never came back. Their relatives are trapped between despair and hope, staying in ignorance about their lives. The feeling of "unfinished loss" makes people who have lost their close to find ways to maintain emotional contact: they keep memorable and personal things, they don't change their rooms, write them messages without getting reply and celebrate their birthdays.

 

I and my colleague journalist Andrey Yakovlev have met relatives of missing people and asked them to tell about missing person. The aim of this photo project is to reconstruct the image of missing ones, tell about him or her and when possible find them.

 

Around 120 thousand people are still missing in Russia from year to year, and around 50 thousand of them are never found. More than that, the system of psychological support and assistance to families who faced tradegy and got psychological trauma due to the loss of close one almost doesn't exist.

The project with text of Andrey Yakovlev was published in February 2018 by the Village and Bird in Flight

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