With Halloween increasingly criticized by conservatives in Russia as a foreign holiday, local photographer Svetlana Yerygina decided to explore the artistic idea of transplanting the pumpkin into the Russian context.
Over the course of a day, she shot a series of photographs of a man wearing a pumpkin on his head and an iconic Adidas track suit in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
“I’ve long meant to combine the grim aesthetic of Halloween with the grim aesthetic of Russian reality," Yerygina told the local NGS.ru news website, where the photographs were originally published.
"A pumpkin itself has no nationality — it’s neither typically Russian nor American — so to me it was about finding the right context to put it in. That’s how I created a pumpkin-head man who experiences all the perks of Russian daily life without all the party attributes of Halloween," she explained.
