Yuliya Levit Photography

08/29/2023

Recent studio photo session for Tatiana Musica - a multidisciplinary artist based in Oregon and a good friend
Muah:
Studio space: newly reopened

03/03/2023

03/03/2023

06/23/2021

06/23/2021

02/08/2017

Ira, Ilya's mom (5/5)

I kept feeling like maybe I was on a business trip. Like I’d hear, "Ok, the trip is over, go home!" and take off and go. Later, right before I went to visit Moscow, one of my father’s former co-workers from Moscow came to see him. I had also stopped by and my dad mentioned, "You know, Ira is going to Moscow, too". And the guest asked, "Oh, where will you stay?" And I thought, "Really, where will I stay?" I felt like I was going home – I wasn’t even thinking about what was there. I felt like I would arrive and that would be it. But when I came, I saw that in those two or three years everything has changed so much, and, most importantly, the people have changed a lot. And I probably changed, too. I arrived and then I wanted to go home, to come back here. It immediately cured me of nostalgia. So I came home to my boys, and everything was good. I didn’t want to go back to Russia at all.

02/07/2017

Ira, Ilya's mom (4/5)
I remember when we got here Ilya was the only person around me who could speak English and understood anything. So at first I had to take him along even just to go grocery shopping. And he was very embarrassed when I spoke Russian to him. He kept shushing me, "Don’t speak Russian to me". He didn’t like that we didn’t dress the right way.And we hardly had the clothes – we were leaving in the winter, in December, but arrived here in May... and our luggage came in the fall. The only thing I could do was take all of their long-sleeved shirts, cut off the sleeves, and hem them by hand. And that’s what they wore.

*Illustration by Tanya Levina

02/06/2017

Ira, Ilya's mom (3/5)
Chickens were cheapest, so I used them to make everything I could think of. I bought the chickens that were dubbed the "long-lasting" chickens. They were very big and they were blue. One time I decided to experiment. I boiled a chicken for eight hours. The result was the same, it was like rubber.There was something that had to be done with it. And Ilya [son] was growing. He ate non-stop –or at least he wanted to eat non-stop. I had taken a pan and a pot with me just in case. So that was my whole day – pan, pot, pot, pan. I had a lot of time, and my child needed to eat.

02/04/2017

Ira, Ilya's mom (2/5)

In Vienna, right before Christmas, we went to a supermarket. We were walking around the store with an empty shopping cart, looking at everything, making little noises about how expensive it all was. And suddenly other shoppers started putting money into our cart. They decided that we were poor, that we were down-and-out; they were giving us charity before Christmas. We were shocked. At first we didn’t understand what was happening and thought that maybe someone dropped something, but then we saw – first one woman put some money in, then another man, and all of them were wishing us luck. We felt frightened and nauseated.