Gwyneth Giller and Kristina Shakht drop into Girl Talk somewhere between a liquidation sale at Barneys, dreams gone wrong, and “manifestation pop”.
As luck would have it, I first met Kristina Shakht at the opening of Dylan Rose Rheingold’s show The Blueprint—the true epitome of girlhood whimsy. Kristina’s the kind of girl who talks to you like an old friend from the moment you meet (my favorite kind). She’s also the kind of girl who can pivot from Russian political history to archival Miu Miu in the same breath. Her photography feels like something out of a dream—Sofia Coppola–esque, with its own sharp editorial flair. I knew right away she had to photograph her own self-portraits for this feature.
We found ourselves deep in conversation about everything from generational matryoshka mementos to how clothes can become camouflage. Over a Zoom call, with way too many web tabs open, we spoke about beauty standards, body image, the haunting logic of fashion, and whether or not photos of an old lover should survive in the camera roll.
Gwyneth Giller: What were you doing earlier today?
Kristina Shakht: I was just like running errands, emails, like all the administrative work. Oh, I was actually setting up the newsletter—that was fun.
GG: Okay, she’s online. Have you done any scrolling today?
KS: I’m chronically online but I’m not really on TikTok, I try to avoid it like the plague. I feel like there’s different forms of being online. I’m secretly obsessed with academia, AKA I’m nerdy. I listen to an insane amount of podcasts on political science. Some are specifically about Russia because that’s where I’m from.
What’s happening in the US is so vegan and vegetarian compared to what’s happening in Russia—in Russia the law has disintegrated.
GG: Oh my god, definitely. Wow, I wasn’t expecting this to be a poli-sci girl talk.
KS: I mean, I watch a lot of dog videos as well.
GG: [laughs] Same, I just saw this video where a dog and a crow became best friends.
KS: I love the account, WeRateDogs, it’s the best. I want a dog but you can’t have a dog in New York if you don’t have a big apartment and you don’t live near the park.
GG: I literally have a dog because my boyfriend adopted a dog with his ex-girlfriend. So now I’m a mother, which wasn’t on my mid-20’s bingo card.
KS: I’m actually jealous.
GG: Where do you live?
KS: Boerum Hill. It’s kind of in the middle of Downtown Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill.
GG: Are you close to the Macy’s in Downtown Brooklyn?
KS: Oh, it’s two blocks away from me.
GG: I’m so jealous. Are you a department store girl?
KS: It depends on which department store I guess.
GG: Rank your top three department stores.
KS: I didn’t grow up with a concept of a department store, so I’m still trying to understand what type of department store girl I am. But when I moved here, Barneys was closing.
GG: Tragic.
KS: But not so tragic for me because they were having a liquidation sale. And at the time, I was broke, I literally immigrated with $1,200.
GG: Wait, what did you buy?
KS: I got these Helmet Lang satin red pants. I love them. I also bought these shoes that are sparkly and are kind of giving Celine: Phoebe Philo era. They’re that shape where they were a little bit bulkier and the heel is chunky.
GG: I was just looking at your self-portraits and was loving the shoes you were wearing.
KS: Those are the shoes!
GG: How do you approach dressing yourself for your self-portraits?
KS: There’s one more piece that should be coming tomorrow—a really beautiful vintage Dior. I sourced it myself. There’s also this Miu Miu vintage archival piece from the 2007 collection. It gets kind of blown out with the flash, but it still looks so beautiful—the turquoise turns almost white, which gives it this haunted doll effect. We actually just shot it for models.com on Eli Langer—she’s mostly done Miu Miu campaigns and shows, so we were like, “We have to put her in it.”
The other look is basically stuff I wear every day—like these Nike lace shorts. I wanted to include casual looks too that feel like myself.
GG: Do you approach yourself as a subject in a different way?
KS: That’s actually what I’m discovering through this—it’s the first time I’ve really done self-portraiture, and thank you for letting me do that by the way. I had to think a lot about how to remove myself mentally from the idea of, “Oh, you have to look cute or pretty,” and instead approach it the way I would when I’m shooting other people.
GG: It must be hard to fight the urge to select the photos that are serving face versus the ones that are compositionally compelling.
KS: Yeah, even beyond compelling, I want to select the ones that will have a cultural impact, you know?
GG: What part of yourself feels the hardest to photograph?
KS: I feel like the majority of people in the fashion or photography industry—especially women—struggle with this. I honestly haven’t met a single model since I started shooting who didn’t have some kind of body image issue. Same goes for photographers, myself included. It’s more about actively quieting that inner voice that critiques how my body looks.
GG: Have you ever scrapped photos because someone was feeling a certain way after seeing them?
KS: So, I shoot a lot of Polaroid—I love Polaroid. Lately, I’ve been laying the images out in front of people and saying, “Okay, let’s go over these and see what feels strong.” And honestly, most of the time we’re on the same page about what works and what doesn’t. The good stuff is pretty obvious.
GG: What’s one word that you want people to associate with your work?
KS: That’s so hard.
GG: I was going to say “dreamy”.
KS: My upcoming book is called Dreamlands.
GG: That’s so exciting! Who’s publishing it?
KS: I can’t say much. It’s hopefully coming out next year.
GG: Do you ever get ideas for shoots from your dreams?
KS: I might have. Or—actually—I have a recurring bad dream.
GG: What is it?
KS: It’s not even really a bad dream. Do you know what an immigrant dream is?
GG: I don’t.
KS: Oh my god. I moved here knowing I didn’t want to go back. I grew up in a good school, in the city—St. Petersburg, kind of like New York—and everyone around me wanted to make something of themselves, to leave and have any kind of good life. I talked to a lot of immigrants, especially when I first moved, and we all had this same recurring dream: you go back home—and you can’t come back.
GG: That’s horrible.
KS: Right? I used to have it at least once a week. And they’ve evolved over time with my actual immigration process.
GG: Did you take many photos of your life in Russia?
KS: Unfortunately, no. When I was living there, I hated it so much. I didn’t feel inspired by it. My great-grandmother was Indigenous Russian, and her entire family—except for her—was repressed and sent to labor camps in the early 1920s and 1930s. I’d love to go to her region, Mordovia, and photograph the villages, the national costumes—everything. Because there might still be these 80 or 90-year-old grandmothers who remember that culture firsthand. But after them, it might not exist anymore.
GG: I wonder what their girl talk sounds like…
KS: Yeah, they must have some stories to tell. But I do have this stack of old photos, when I saw my mom and grandma in Turkey last May, they gave me a pile of family pictures. My family are total picture hoarders—we even have a photo from my great-great-grandmother’s funeral.
GG: Wow.
KS: Yeah—my great-great-grandfather’s mom. It’s from 1935. It’s wild. There’s a hay rooftop in the background, some village—it looks straight out of a history book. I think I have a scan of it on my phone somewhere.
In the photo, she’s lying in this wooden casket, and all her children are standing around her. There were seven of them—my great-grandfather was the second—and they’re holding brass instruments, all facing the camera. The way it’s framed, the expressions, everything—it’s incredible.
GG: Wow, that’s so wild to have a personal record of how those ceremonies have culturally translated and evolved, because what you’re describing feels very spiritual and grounded to me. Whereas now, you think of contemporary American funeral service and how different that is—like so capitalist-driven.
KS: Exactly. Like a casket is 4k to 10k?
GG: Yeah, no, it’s fucking crazy. What’s your first memory that you have as a child in St. Petersburg?
KS: Well, it’s actually not in St. Petersburg, it’s in Albuquerque. Because I lived in Albuquerque until I was four.
GG: Oh my god, we love New Mexico, home of High School Musical.
KS: I didn’t know it was shot there.
GG: What was your memory?
KS: They’re all mixed up together, but I think I’m still holding on to them because that was what I was holding on to for 20 years living in Russia, not being able to come back.
And it’s all really complicated because when I was living in Russia, I cherished what I thought was my American identity. But moving back here, I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t want anything to do with this.
GG: That’s so interesting. And what was your perception of America at that time?
KS: Well, I thought everything was basically just like High School Musical.
GG: What do you think the difference is—if there is one—between Russian feminine beauty standards and American feminine beauty standards?
KS: I can’t really start thinking or talking about it without considering politics honestly. In Russia, women have been working and getting an education since 1917. Both of my grandmas are engineers. I’m pretty sure my great-grandmas have university education too.
GG: That’s amazing.
KS: Yeah so I was thinking this morning—“Does my grandma own dresses?” I’m not sure.
GG: Interesting. I’ve been watching A League of Their Own, which is a movie about the first American women’s baseball league. But Abby Jacobson adapted it into a TV series, and a big point is that all the women in the league aren’t allowed to be seen wearing pants in public. Also thinking a lot about Rosa Bonheur…
KS: That’s an interesting commonality between Russian and American beauty standards—this idea of performative femininity. Russians are still considered very well put-together—the standards are crazy, like nails, hair, whatever—but there’s not such an emphasis on dresses and skirts.
GG: Maybe there is now because of the right-wing agenda?
KS: Yeah, I think that affects how women dress, because the way we put garments on ourselves—everything in general—is political. Clothes especially.
GG: Totally.
KS: I realized that early on, clothes help me shapeshift. I had cops called on me by my teachers and headmistress in my last year of school for being “too political.” And I remember thinking, I’m gonna go into that police station dressed in a pink ruffle shirt and baby-blue jeans to look innocent as hell.
GG: Wait, what the fuck?
KS: I was just talking to them like kids probably talk to teachers here. We have political prisoners in Russia as early as 14 now. I just got really lucky because I was let off.
But clothes were extremely political, we’d have a standardized uniform in our gymnasium. But they’d bitch at me constantly about not wearing wool pants that had to be either black or burgundy, and I’d be like, “Well, I’d love for you to focus on my academics as much as you focus on my uniform.”
GG: This is different but I went to an all-girls Roman Catholic high school, and every morning we had to have our skirts measured by our teachers. It was an oddly vulnerable thing for a young woman to do every morning.
KS: For us, they were doing the same with boys—it wasn’t just girls. And in Russia, most teachers are women, the people who called the cops on me were women. My headmistress was 27—calling cops on a 17-year-old! Only a couple years ago I started verbalizing it to my therapist. She helped me realize it was adults bullying a child for nothing.
GG: Do you think this case was more so linked to the socio-political fabric of Russia?
KS: I think it’s just the authoritarian system. Me acting like that was seen as “out of line.” They probably thought, “She’s a threat to society; nip it in the bud.”
GG: Is English your first language or Russian?
KS: Kind of both simultaneously. I started speaking English first; my dad never learned Russian.
GG: You said Russian feels more expansive as a language—are there any words you miss using in English?
I’m Welsh, and there’s a word hiraeth—a longing for something lost or something that may have never existed. I love words like that, ones that describe such nuanced, poetic feelings.
KS: I miss a lot of descriptive words—especially adjectives. One of them is русый, it’s the color of my hair, somewhere between blonde and brown, with ashy, honey, or slightly reddish tones. It’s a whole spectrum in between rather than a single shade. I was told growing up that it’s a distinctly Slavic trait, and I really miss the richness of words like that, especially those that describe color with such subtlety.
GG: That’s so beautiful. Okay, unserious question: who do you think understands a camera best—Britney Spears, Sofia Coppola, or Cindy Sherman?
KS: Oh. I gotta go with Cindy.
GG: What’s your favorite Sofia Coppola movie?
KS: So funny—I haven’t watched many. My boyfriend just watched Somewhere, the one shot at Chateau Marmont and loved it. I’ve seen Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation, but that’s it.
GG: You have to watch The Virgin Suicides and The Beguiled—they’re so girl core. Do you remember your first crush?
KS: I think it was some Russian pop star.
GG: Do you have a celeb crush now?
KS: For some reason I’m thinking of women artists—but I have a crush on their work more so than them.
GG: Who’s your work crush?
KS: I’ve been listening to Addison Rae’s new album nonstop.
GG: Dying. I actually ran into her last week while I was shopping—she helped my friend Nanette pick out a dress.
KS: That’s adorable. I read a great piece about her music being “manifestation pop.”
GG: It is! Such good aura. Do you believe in deleting old photos of a lover, or do you keep everything?
KS: Oh, I keep receipts.
GG: Me too, girl. Well—sometimes…
KS: Not on social media…that’s weird. But in my camera roll, yes. I have over 120,000 images.
GG: Same. I’ve deleted before and regretted it—it’s like gaslighting yourself into erasing memories which obviously isn’t really possible.
KS: Exactly. Also, my iPhone deleted everything twice when I lived in Russia.
GG: Devastating. Do you believe in signs?
KS: Like signs from God? I’d say I’m scientific and agnostic, but I have a weird mix of superstition.
GG: So more habitual than spiritual?
KS: Yes, like tennis-player superstition.
GG: What’s one thing you hope never stops feeling mysterious?
KS: It sounds basic—but love and art.
GG: That’s not basic, that’s beautiful. Speaking of manifestation pop: describe an image your life will unfold to in 10 years from now.
KS: More beautiful. But this is where my superstition comes in—I don’t want to jinx it.
GG: Fair. Last question: is there a cute Russian farewell you’d use to end this convo?
KS: Poka poka.
GG: What does that mean?
KS: Bye-bye.
GG: Spell it for me?
KS: Пока-пока.
