Kamila Rustambekova photographs migratory workers in Uzbekistan as they seek community and opportunity

Each year, in the Farish region of Uzbekistan, a large community of seasonal farm workers arrive in the area to begin cultivating the land. For the next eight months, this sparsely populated area will become their home, as they set up makeshift villages to live in while they toil away in the fields. For Uzbek photographer Kamila Rustambekova, this migration, from the east, where the workers live, to the west, where they make their money, has been of interest since her grandfather told her about it years ago. “First coming to the region, which is 150-180 miles from my current home, I was in search of what my grandfather told me,” she recalls. “As a child, he lived up there, at the foot of the mountains.”

In her ongoing series Another Paris, Kamila documents this transitory experience, observing how the community establishes its new home, and in doing so, questioning the very concept. “I want to present the region and its people how it’s perceived by me, and how it was perceived by my family, who used to tell stories about this beautiful place,” she says of the work. “I want to capture this farming community in its own atmosphere, while it exists, while there is water in our region mixing personal with global narratives.”

Kamila’s images reveal the reality of seasonal agricultural work, which is long and tiring, but carried out between close-knit families, friends and other loved ones. In the photos, we see toil interspersed with moments of play, depicting a reality that is marked by both burden and bond. Adults pick crops, bag up their harvest, and prepare food, while children play in the temporary village and roam in the fields. There is a sense of belonging, despite the distance of these families from their actual homes away in the east.

Another theme that is also at play in Another Paris is the idea of opportunity, which Kamila explains is strangely symbolised by the presence of an Eiffel Tower replica in the local area. In fact, the name ‘Farish’ sounds very similar to ‘Paris’ in the Uzbek and Russian languages, and the photographer notes that this is interesting, because the wider country has a long-standing fascination with the French capital. Many Uzbek people dream of Paris as a magical place, and many other replicas of the Eiffel Tower are dotted around Uzbekistan, explains Kamila. In Farish, the tower stands at the entrance to the village, and serves as an incongruous signifier of opportunity to the workers who arrive each year to make a living.

“I [wanted] to portray the Farish region and community of farmers working there with some level of ‘truth’, in a romantic way, using formalism in my work,” says Kamila. “I think the series is a counterpoint for a dream and reality. The dream is coming both from my grandparents’ stories and from the name of the region – the idea of being a little Paris.”