City Cosmonaut – Part 1 – Ophelia Autumn

Am I a Moscow-smonaut?…

The photoshoot in Moscow with Isabelle Touyarou was otherworldly. I love snow and interesting places, so you can imagine I was very pleased we shot in some amazing locations. There will be more pictures coming from the session in the next few weeks!

Here I decided to be all galaxy-themed, as a nod to cosmonauts and the space conquest, but also to Russian sci-fi and exploration in general. Part 2 of this outfit session will be more urban, stay tuned!

This whole section was shot in November at the bottom of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space next to the VDNKh metro station. It was unveiled in 1964, for the 7th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch.

With a height of 107 meters, it was quite a challenge to get pictures with both of us, but Isabelle took some great shots.

The statue at the front of the monument depicts Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a rocket scientist and a pioneer of astronautics. Read his bio on Wikipedia, it’s quite interesting.

He was inspired by Jules Verne when he theorised around rocket propulsion.

Science fiction and fantasy have quite a long history in Russia.

I talked about Mikhail Bulgakov in a previous post inspired by the Master and Margarita. Another author that I enjoyed reading a while ago is Yevgueny Zamyatin, who wrote the novel We in 1921. I particularly liked the translation of Natasha Randall, as she tried to convey the poetry and sound play from Zamyatin’s work that might have originated from his synesthesia. The main character is a spacecraft engineer that lives in a future world where people’s individuality and emotions are heavily regulated.

Another novel that I would recommend is Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. In this novel, aliens have dumped things on earth, that can be dangerous to humans, and people that try to retrieve them are called Stalkers, which in turn inspired Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 and the eponymous video game. Spoiler: another article with Metro 2033 references is coming soon 🙂

This book was adapted on screen as “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979. I’ll watch it at some point! But I did watch his adaptation of Solaris, which takes place in a space station.