Overtime is a photobook about a football boarding school and its professional women’s team on Moscow’s outskirts. Over four years, it follows queer teenagers coming of age amid discipline, belonging, and visibility.
I came to this world through what I share with the players: early sport (rhythmic gymnastics for me) and learning to name and negotiate queerness. The work tracks survival strategies created by the game and by the team. Off camera is a state that denies legal recognition, criminalizes queer visibility, and makes self-regulation a condition of safety.
Their daily life is surrounded by a suburb where vegetation pushes through concrete and housing blocks, fruit ripens quickly, and summers are brief. It maps a coming of age landscape that is working class and suffocatingly heteronormative. The football world remains a bubble, while changing cultural norms and ideology are gradually squeezing the oxygen out of other spaces. Inside the bubble, solidarity holds; outside, the same bodies and gestures become vulnerable and need camouflage. The viewer sees a collective identity form through tattoos and sports brands, and how “athlete” becomes a safer label than “feminist” or “pro Western”.
Overtime follows teenagers that make irrational choices out of passion and not desperation. Photography becomes a tool of visual validation and self-presentation. The book registers a community that is legally restricted and socially policed, yet still full of life for a brief moment.
Photographer : Margo Ovcharenko
Size:240x290mm
Page :96
Edition:500
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