Overtime, 2021
2018-2021
Overtime is a series of photographs that focuses on a football boarding school and its professional women’s team on the outskirts of Moscow. It witnesses how queer teenagers come of age within systems of discipline, belonging, and visibility. My interest in the football environment grew out of experiences I share with the players, early involvement in sport in my case rhythmic gymnastics, and the process of recognizing and negotiating one’s queerness. The book attends to strategies of survival and moments of refuge that emerge through the game itself and through collective participation, while the political context remains off camera, shaping a reality in which queer identities are denied legal recognition, public visibility is criminalized, and self regulation becomes a condition of safety.
The photographs were made over four football seasons and trace the everyday life of the community on the field, in the locker room, and during informal gatherings. They register the intensity and fragility of athletic bodies and situate the players within a working class suburb where nature presses against concrete and growing up unfolds in a suffocatingly heteronormative environment. Within the narrow zones where their presence is permitted, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and shared visibility, allowing a collective identity to form inside a fragile bubble of solidarity. Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved, constructing a reality shaped by a specific historical and professional context in which intimacy, growth, and care unfold within a limited season. The final section of the series links bodily injury and emotional experience to the recurring motif of apples, introduced as signs of ripening and abundance and culminating in the image of apples discarded on the roadside.
Read Lesley Martin’s take on Overtime on Aperture’s website, where the project was shortlisted for a portfolio prize in 2022.
Read Margo Ovcharenko’s interview conducted by Yana Nosenko on LensCulture. It was published in January 2026 as part of the online exhibitions presented by the Griffin Museum of Photography.
The photographs were made over four football seasons and trace the everyday life of the community on the field, in the locker room, and during informal gatherings. They register the intensity and fragility of athletic bodies and situate the players within a working class suburb where nature presses against concrete and growing up unfolds in a suffocatingly heteronormative environment. Within the narrow zones where their presence is permitted, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and shared visibility, allowing a collective identity to form inside a fragile bubble of solidarity. Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved, constructing a reality shaped by a specific historical and professional context in which intimacy, growth, and care unfold within a limited season. The final section of the series links bodily injury and emotional experience to the recurring motif of apples, introduced as signs of ripening and abundance and culminating in the image of apples discarded on the roadside.
Read Lesley Martin’s take on Overtime on Aperture’s website, where the project was shortlisted for a portfolio prize in 2022.
Read Margo Ovcharenko’s interview conducted by Yana Nosenko on LensCulture. It was published in January 2026 as part of the online exhibitions presented by the Griffin Museum of Photography.