Overtime series, 2018-2021
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.
Overtime is a series 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—rhythmic gymnastics in my case—and the process of recognizing and negotiating one’s queerness. The photobook attends to the strategies of survival and moments of refuge that emerge through the game itself and through collective participation.
Off camera lies the political context in which the team represents the values of a society that denies queer identities legal recognition, criminalizes public visibility, and forces ongoing self-regulation as 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 at the informal gatherings. The images are a visceral testament to the temporary nature of physical states—fatigue, injury, recovery, moments of strength—that athletes experience with particular intensity. The players are surrounded by a working-class suburb where vegetation pushes through concrete and prefabricated housing blocks, fruit ripens quickly, and summers are brief. These images outline a social landscape of growing up—proletarian and suffocatingly heteronormative. This landscape functions as an active force within the project, permitting the protagonists’ presence only within narrowly defined zones: on the field, in the locker room, inside the team.
Within these boundaries, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and self-presentation. For the players, being photographed is part of shaping a shared visibility and affirming their position as athletes; for me, it is a way of registering a community whose public queer visibility is legally restricted and socially policed in contemporary Russia.
The football world remains a bubble, while changing cultural norms and ideology are gradually squeezing the oxygen out of other spaces. Inside the bubble, rules of close-knit solidarity apply, but outside it, the same bodies and gestures instantly become vulnerable and require camouflage. The viewer observes how female footballers adopt a collective identity: they get tattoos, wear sports brands and, instead of being labelled as pro-Western teenagers or feminists, become visible primarily as athletes.
Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved. The book constructs 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 injuries 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.
My interest in the football environment grew out of experiences I share with the players: early involvement in sport—rhythmic gymnastics in my case—and the process of recognizing and negotiating one’s queerness. The photobook attends to the strategies of survival and moments of refuge that emerge through the game itself and through collective participation.
Off camera lies the political context in which the team represents the values of a society that denies queer identities legal recognition, criminalizes public visibility, and forces ongoing self-regulation as 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 at the informal gatherings. The images are a visceral testament to the temporary nature of physical states—fatigue, injury, recovery, moments of strength—that athletes experience with particular intensity. The players are surrounded by a working-class suburb where vegetation pushes through concrete and prefabricated housing blocks, fruit ripens quickly, and summers are brief. These images outline a social landscape of growing up—proletarian and suffocatingly heteronormative. This landscape functions as an active force within the project, permitting the protagonists’ presence only within narrowly defined zones: on the field, in the locker room, inside the team.
Within these boundaries, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and self-presentation. For the players, being photographed is part of shaping a shared visibility and affirming their position as athletes; for me, it is a way of registering a community whose public queer visibility is legally restricted and socially policed in contemporary Russia.
The football world remains a bubble, while changing cultural norms and ideology are gradually squeezing the oxygen out of other spaces. Inside the bubble, rules of close-knit solidarity apply, but outside it, the same bodies and gestures instantly become vulnerable and require camouflage. The viewer observes how female footballers adopt a collective identity: they get tattoos, wear sports brands and, instead of being labelled as pro-Western teenagers or feminists, become visible primarily as athletes.
Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved. The book constructs 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 injuries 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.