Internat

The Internat – or Petrykhiv Children’s Home as its translated name reads – is a secluded estate that sits on the outskirts of the city of Ternopil, on the banks of the Seret river. Large and looming, a thick stone wall skirts its boundaries. On the inside, an all-female staff of nannies and nurses in white uniforms walk shadowy hallways seared with shafts of light from dusty windows. One male director oversees proceedings. “Seventy women, reportedly ill, none older than thirty-five, reside within its boundaries,” reads the text of her self-published book.

In the years that followed, Drake went on to complete two major bodies of work. Over the course of five years she shot Two Rivers, an expansive photographic record of people, stories and landscapes made while travelling the main waterways of Central Asia, and Wild Pigeon, in which she immersed herself into the communities of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Seeking to bring the people she was documenting into her creative process as active collaborators, Drake travelled with a box of scissors and pens, asking people she encountered along the way to draw upon and reassemble the images she had taken. “I felt like this blending of authorship gave the work more depth and shifted the meaning,” she says, “highlighting the intersection of our viewpoints rather than a single authoritative voice.”

Having begun to wonder what became of the girls she had photographed in the Internat, Drake returned there in 2014, and found that most of them were still there, adult women by then. This time, she had ideas of collaboration in mind. “In Wild Pigeon, I had invited people to collaborate after making the pictures. In this series, it seemed to make more sense to involve the women in the process of making them.”

In their cloistered existence, Drake became interested in how the women, “sculpt their own ideas of femaleness from the limited interactions and sources to the outside world they have.” Developing in a world entirely without the presence of men, the women had shaped and moulded their identities, and their ideas of what it means to be a woman, from the hodgepodge of fantastical imagery they had before them – from fairytales and fables, religious imagery, soap operas, old storybooks and myths.

In front of Drake’s camera and with her encouragement, the girls played out their own fictions and fantasies, and embodied characters pulled from her own subconscious too. “When not occupied by daily chores, they play the roles of mother, daughter, queen, wolf, monster, and pixie,” the text in her book continues, and fantasy is crafted out of the sense of imagination she found there. In this space as a backdrop for her photographs, “nature, real-life activities, and the thick walls surrounding the facility became vehicles for exploring questions about control, the imagination, and the construction of normal female behaviour.”

The images in Internat are expressive and sculptural, performative and painterly. We see the women make brooms out of bundles of sticks, tend to vegetable gardens, weave their hands through ribbons to create star shapes, kneel in brightly coloured clothes to gather flowers, drape tinsel over themselves, and contort their bodies against the light to cast shadowy forms across the walls. Often, the women’s faces are obscured; painted over, covered with props or turned away from the lens, in some ways perpetuating their myth.

During the times Drake was restricted from photographing – which were frequent – she sought out other ways to collaborate with the women outside of taking pictures. In a local bookshop, she came across a book about the 19th century Ukrainian artist, serf, poet and imprisoned political figure Taras Shevchenko. She took the book apart, and invited the women to paint upon its imagery. In colourful swathes and swirls of paint they affected the pictures, reimagining the scenes of history before them. “In doing so,” Drake says, “they became artists, creators, ethnographers, and designers themselves.”  

The plans I arrived with inevitably turned into something different once the women got in front of the camera.” Drake’s presence, and her process, introduced a feeling of uncertainty, as well as a curiosity, about what is ‘normal’ and what isn’t, and the fluidity of the roles of author and subject were subverted. “As someone working in photography, a medium that’s often associated with precision and truthfulness, that was interesting to me,” Drake explains. “I wanted to work toward upsetting that standard.”