There is a part of society and real life that many prefer to ignore, looking the other way. Either because they don’t share its choices and lifestyle, or simply because they’d rather not get involved in certain stories that aren’t easy to accept or face. Sofiya Loriashvili, photographer and dancer of Ukrainian origin living in France, is one of those people who turn their gaze precisely toward this part of society and the stories it has to tell.

A documentary photographer for years, Sofiya takes her homeland as the starting point and main reference for her work: through her lens she tells the story of her generation’s transformation across the years of Covid, the pre-war period and the conflict itself. These are stories of young people she lives firsthand and, at the same time, her own story, marked by time spent in psychiatric hospitals and rehabilitation centres — experiences that allow her to express all the chaos, struggles and excesses lived by many young people like her.

Through the projects of Sofiya Loriashvili, the young photographer seems to pay tribute to the great names of social and documentary photography of the twentieth century. Her commitment to showing the lives of the marginalised without filters recalls the artistic and social mission of photographers like Susan Sontag, while also echoing the rawness and grunge aesthetic of Nan Goldin‘s work.

Her home country and her generation are not, however, Loriashvili’s only frame of reference. To them she adds what has become her second home: Paris. Here Sofiya turns her documentary eye toward a side of life that remains mysterious to many: the lives of strippers at a club in the city.

This is how one of her most recent works came to be: Stripper Edition. A series of authentic shots, many of which capture the backstage moments and breaks of the dancers, away from the spotlights and the gaze of regular visitors: inside the club’s dressing room. Here the women are entirely different people from the characters they build on stage, where, as Loriashvili herself has said, “the walk changes, the facial expressions too, and even the voice. The moment they walk through the door and leave the dressing room, they put on a mask. They switch straight into work mode.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Luigi Falanga and Gaia Forlin aka @super8otto.