‘The Kazakh school uniforms look like the Red Army’ – Frédéric Noy’s best phone picture

The World Press Photo award winner on an image taken in unfamiliar territory

Shooting with an iPhone, says French photographer Frederic Noy, is like mild psychotherapy. Sometimes, you get stuck. Taking a few pictures with an iPhone is like a liberation. A reset, a moment of reflection. You see things differently."

Noy arrived in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, mid-pandemic, after many years in Africa, where he had documented the daily lives of persecuted LGBTQ+ Ugandans; he had won World Press Photo and Visa d'Or awards for his work on the environmental disaster in Lake Victoria. I wanted to go somewhere as distant and as different as possible," he says. Kazakhstan was the last country to leave the USSR, and it's still constructing its identity. That's what interested me. All I knew about it was cliche."