This image certainly borrows from imagery used by Parr, Boris Mikhailov, Weegee, and others, but I guess the question is whether she does something new with it. I think she does.
Parr was looking at a certain kind of middle and working class leisure, and Mikhailov was layering that sort of imagery on the backdrop of environmental decay in the late Soviet Ukraine.
Mielnikiewicz is also using the diagonal of High Stalinist graphics (whether deliberately or unconsciously--the ship is level with the horizon, so the camera is tilted), which once represented the heroic march into the future--
but now it's the rusting hulk of a ship that was once a floating bar, when Abkhazia was more of an elegant tourist destination in a Soviet sort of way. This is about Russians who still think of Abkhazia as a tourist spot in spite of the poverty and decay and the dissolution of the Soviet empire, and it's a good vignette of post-Soviet life.
Linear Mode
