Emine Ziyatdinova's Photographs of Russian Émigrés in Brighton Beach Emine Ziyatdinova had not been back to her small village in Ukraine for more than two years. She had been living in Ohio, studying photojournalism and feeling a bit out of place. Then she went to Brighton Beach. There, along Brooklyn's southern shore last January, she saw familiar faces and signs, heard familiar voices and music and encountered familiar attitudes. "When you walked around, people were just mean," she joked. I missed that about my country, people not being polite on the streets. But the more time she spent digging into people's lives and dreams in churches, basements, nightclubs and on the beach, the more she realized that maybe the area wasn't as Russian as she had first thought. "When you settle down, you start to notice different things," she said. It's not as exciting to you when it's new. People are just New Yorkers. They don't have the time. She had the luxury of spending more than five months in the area, living and shooting there thanks to a fellowship from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund. The resulting portfolio was her master's thesis at Ohio University. Emma Raynes, the foundation's direction, said Ms. Ziyatdinova - who is a Crimean Tatar from Ukraine - brought a cultural sensitivity that was reflected in her images, which are by turns melancholy, absurd and funny. "Her work has the sense of a time capsule, that nostalgic feel of things that have lasted over the years," Ms. Raynes said. At the same time, it's a community going though a time of change, and with different people moving in. Ms. Ziyatdinova, 25, could relate to change. The Soviet Union collapsed when she was a toddler. Her family was forcibly relocated to Uzbekistan under Stalin's regime. They returned to Crimea soon afterward, but had to settle in a tiny farming village. Like many of her generation - and the one which preceded her to these shores - America loomed large in her imagination. "I lived through this transition and wanted to document it," she said. It's about the common experience of moving and having this Soviet past. Like a lot of people who moved here, they have very high expectations and they don't have a real idea of what it is. When I was photographing this project, I was thinking about what people were looking for when they came. The hopes they had. What they left behind. How those hopes and expectations met reality. Or didn't meet it. Maybe that's why getting into the neighborhood's daily rhythms proved a little more daunting than she expected. Though she had done some work in advance, looking up churches and cultural groups, she met resistance when she first hit the streets last January. She walked up to people and spoke Russian. They ignored her. Then she tried taking pictures of people lined up to receive free food. "They said 'You're from Ukraine and you're going to publish those pictures to embarrass us in front of our people,'" she recalled. When people move here, they want the people they left behind to think they succeeded, found a new life here and can send money back. She eased her way into the community with the help of some of her subjects: a female bodybuilding champion (slide 13), an octogenarian former mathematics professor, and a healer who lived in the basement of an apartment building. She met others: like a one-time nuclear researcher turned mail-order bride who, for two years, was unable to communicate with her (now former) American husband. Or the old women who had long ago mastered Soviet-era black market skills and now sold bootleg cigarettes under the table. Some had made a bittersweet peace with their lives here. Yuri, the healer, became a good friend and even let her move in with him and his girlfriend over the summer. Originally from Kazakhstan, he came to this country in 1993 to introduce a form of Kazakh-style falconry to a group in Nebraska. He never left, eventually making his way to Brighton Beach and settling into a basement apartment where he treated clients and practiced his esoteric rituals. "He's a great friend, but he talks a lot about weird things with which I definitely disagree," she said. But it's sad. He and his girlfriend live in this basement. They don't have anything. He had even less after Hurricane Sandy flooded him out. "I visited him after Sandy and I saw his Soviet passport drying," she recalled. He lost everything. He has nothing. He doesn't even have a passport from a real country anymore. After her time in Ohio and Brighton Beach, she can relate to a similar feeling of feeling disconnected. Soon, she will be visiting her parents in Ukraine. She's not sure how she will react. "You move from place to place, and you lose your sense of home," she said. My home is my laptop now.