Since Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were forcefully released from the prison camps, they have been busy. There have been television interviews, family dinners, photo shoots… Serving two years for a few seconds of dancing in church to an anti-Putin protest song, Pussy Riot denounced the early release Putin extended to them as a “disgusting” “cynical” “propagandist” “PR move” and now, Nadya and Masha devote their media power to grassroots activism, using their experience at some of Russia’s most horrifying jails as fodder for prison reform. Life goes on, and Yuri Kozyrev documented this with a series of photographs for TIME LightBox.
These are rare and intimate photos. Kozyrev is an award-wining conflict photographer who made a ton of great work during the Arab Spring and whose photographs are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum’s War Photography exhibition. He spent quite some time with post-prison Pussy Riot — shopping at a Moscow department store; dancing at the Gogol Center; strolling Downtown Moscow where the girls were jeered at by someone still “offended” by their YouTube video; posing in front of the Cathedral where the action was performed; sitting with friends and Nadya’s husband, huddled and laughing over a phone while reading that the Moscow screening of Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer documentary was cancelled by the Russian government because the role of art “is to save the world, make it better, not to inflame the public with scandalous stories that have no cultural merit.”
Though the initial images of Maria Alyokhina, disheveled, sickly, still wearing her prison uniform and later, setting off fireworks in front of the jail are dearer to us, these are iconic in their own way. They’re also very glossy. Very magazine-ish. As newly radicalized activists, they can use this image sleekness to their advantage.
(Photos: Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for TIME)
