Scars of Independence

A mother in mourning for her son who died in a car accident. Wearing a pin with a photograph of the dead is an old Caucasian tradition. In recent years, drug addiction and car accidents cause are two of the main causes of death for young people.

The owner of a Volga sits on his rusty car. At one time, Volgas were a symbol of high social status in the former Soviet Union.

The twentieth-anniversary celebration of Abkhazia’s self-proclaimed independence. In the background is the former house of government in Sukhum, the capital.

Young men gather in the main Republican stadium during the twentieth-anniversary celebration Abkhazia’s self-proclaimed independence.

A monument of Vladimir Lenin, Russian politician and political theorist of the USSR times, on a corn field.

Dancers from the national dancing-troupe perform in the main Republican stadium in the capital. The oldest Abkhazian folk company tours only in Russia and in "fraternal" former Soviet republics – partially-recognized South Ossetia and unrecognized Transdniester. The republics of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdniester have formed "The Commonwealth for the Democracy and the Peoples' Rights,” which they believe will help all of them become equal members of the international community.

A couple sits in a railway station destroyed during the war on the Ptsirtskha River. Now there is only bus service inside the country.

Men in traditional Caucasian dress during the twentieth-anniversary celebration of Abkhazia’s self-proclaimed independence.

The ruins of the fortress of Anakopia, which was the capital of the Abkhazian Kingdom in the middle ages.

Olga Ingurazova is a freelance documentary photographer with a background in international relations and economics based in Moscow, Russia. After years of working in the tourism industry, she became active as a photographer and a visual journalist in 2010.
Olga began her photography career by documenting post-conflict recovery and the aftermath of separatist movements in the Caucasus.
Her works have been exhibited in Russia, France, Italy, Portugal, Georgia, Croatia, Latvia and Lithuania. Olga's reportages on Syrian refugees in the Caucasus, on Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine, and on FIFA 2014 in Brazil were published by Lens Culture, Russian Reporter, Kommersant, Ogoniok and others. Her photographs are a part of the permanent collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Olga is a 2014 Aftermath Project grant finalist, a finalist for the 2014 Lucie Foundation Scholarship, and was short-listed for the 2014 Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation grant. She was also named to the 2015 shortlist of Magnum Photo’s "30 under 30" list of emerging documentary photographers, and was listed as one of Photo Boiete’s 2015 “30 under 30 women photographers.”
Currently she is focused on personal long-term projects, working in both photography and multimedia. At the center of her attention are the effects of political, social and environmental processes on peoples’ lives and on the land they inhabit.