What ensues is a glorious lesson in the colourful, the soft, and the dreamlike, as well as every angelic colour under the sun. It’s also a lesson in holding your breath and flapping your arms around (Michael Hutchence not included). The series captures the world’s most oestrogen-heavy sport: synchronised swimming. Yep, chuck on your bathing caps, we’re going for a dip… in stilettos. And you thought that was just for ladies of good-breeding!

(C) 2010 Williams Martinez

Because of the devastation of World War II, Russian “girls” in the ’40s and ’50s were taught to be tough and work hard. I am saddened by the fact that Russia never had the chance to enjoy the happy pin-up times of America’s postwar period. In fact, cheerful American pin-up art was considered in Soviet Russia to be politically incorrect, decadent and flat-out immoral, the product of a culture that could never understand the true nature of the human condition.

By photographing exclusively Russian immigrant women in traditional all-American pin-up poses, I am inventing my own genre of Russian pin-up. My concept is to portray pure beauty, femininity and sexuality, not to objectify but to empower. To those who identify the clues in my work, hidden to most non-Russian eyes, I am telling the story of a crisis of Russian national identity, and the frustration and confusion of self-identification with the Old Country, the New World and a diaspora caught between them. My goal is to bridge the gap and seduce the spectator with alluring imagery, trapping him into empathizing with a foreign element.