In her new book Gut Feeling, photographer Kristina Rozhkova draws on her imprisonment, childhood and immersion in BDSM culture to examine captivity, cruelty and the uneasy relationship between care and control
There is an electrifying, if unnerving, energy to Kristina Rozhkova’s first collaboration with cult independent publisher Void. Both a protest and a record, Gut Feeling is an unflinching look at what it means to hold something or someone against their will, as well as at their request.
The photographer divides her life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ her arrest and incarceration by Russian authorities. This ordeal began in June 2024, when Male State, a male supremacist group lobbied for her arrest after a photo shoot in a cemetery was deemed blasphemous. The group targeted Rozhkova and some of her collaborators, accusing them of ‘insulting the religious feelings of believers’, a legal article that has become an increasingly powerful tool of censorship in Russia. Rozhkova subsequently spent two brutal months in a pre-trial detention centre, four months under house arrest and another year of monthly court hearings, throughout which she lived in fear of re-arrest. Rozhkova now lives in exile and has been recognised as a political prisoner.
An eloquent and generous communicator, she explains that her imprisonment in a room with 13 other women, each with their own (denied) needs, felt like “trapping different species of animals in a single cage”.
“We were entirely incompatible,” she continues, “with completely different ways of life and different voices. In nature, [such different] species are not meant to coexist so closely; they could easily kill each other. It felt like a violent experiment. A kind of madness.”
Gut Feeling confronts uncomfortable truths about humanity: a species that considers itself superior to all others, despite its particular capacity for cruelty and manipulation. Rejecting the use of professional models and constructed sets, Rozhkova offers unfiltered glimpses of her social circle: gap-toothed and bloody-nosed children, domme/sub play. These sit side by side with caged animals: jumbles of white mice bred as reptile food, straining against metal bars or escaping from jars; milk-white specimens floating in formaldehyde; industrial milking machines clamped on the teats of an exhausted cow’s udder.
Already integrated within the BDSM community, Rozhkova conceptualised Gut Feeling before her imprisonment. Having studied philosophy, she was, at that time, absorbed with how the master-slave dynamic manifests within modern capitalist relations. “Submissives are often individuals with significant financial means,” she observes, “who use their resources to step down from elevated positions and play out this role. It creates a paradoxical dialectic where the one submitting ultimately retains control.” Following her incarceration, the human-animal relationship surfaced as an increasingly powerful analogy. Human hands forcing open dogs’ jaws recur throughout the book – an unnerving, ambiguous image, familiar from vet check-ups, suggestive of care but also control.
Rozhkova’s own mother was a dog trainer. Born near the Ural mountains, Rozhkova describes the bull terrier she grew up with, who received her mother’s excess breast milk, as a ‘milk brother’ and her closest friend. Instead of summer camps or holidays, her childhood was spent travelling around dog shows. “Our life was filled with a constant cycle of births, illnesses and sometimes deaths,” she says, noting that her immersion in the animal world led to feeling out of place in the human one and severe bullying. “It was incredibly hard for me to build peer communication.”
For Gut Feeling, Rozhkova spent months trailing vets, reptile breeders, hunters and zoologists, photographing vast, industrial farms as well as small homesteads. “It was vital for me to investigate this theme to the absolute maximum, to experience and document it from the inside.” While recording stark discrepancies in approach to welfare, the pictures demonstrate Rozhkova’s eye for an uncanny form of storytelling. The exquisite curvature of a goose’s white neck clasped in a fist against the wood of a cabin conjures fairytales, Dutch still lifes and Hilma af Klint. Meanwhile, crammed double-spreads of rodents and reptiles, cages and glistening innards, convey a nightmarish, claustrophobic frenzy. She deduced that the hunter’s psyche – a desire for prey, the obsession with the trophy – is an apt stand-in for social and political forces punishing marginalised people or anti-authoritarian perspectives.
Rozhkova considers Gut Feeling her most important project to date and she’ll continue developing it across disciplines. It is explicitly an act of protest, and she argues powerfully for its universality: “I believe that almost every person has, at some point, experienced that feeling of being caged, a sense of internal tension, or the weight of authority and total control [...] Whenever I previously tried to speak about my experience, I realised that people don’t want to confront uncomfortable realities. They prefer to live in their own beautiful, safe worlds, turning a blind eye to political prisoners and pain. Even within the creative community, many just want to produce comfortable projects and make money. Gut Feeling is my refusal to play along.”
Gut Feeling by Kristina Rozhkova is published by Void and available for pre-order now.
