‘You think you’re immortal’: Dmitry Markov’s best phone picture

Russian teenagers hanging out reminded the photographer of his own childhood in a workers' settlement

It was in woods behind an apartment building that photographer Dmitry Markov noticed a group of teenagers hanging out on the old couch and rope swing. He was in Pskov, a Russian city close to the Estonian border. Markov had grown up 800km away, in Pushkino, which is just outside Moscow, and as rope-swinging was a pastime he fondly remembered from his own youth, he stopped to take a photo on his iPhone X.

I grew up in a workers' settlement in the 80s and early 90s, where plenty of families faced social problems like unemployment and alcoholism," he says. Many children were left to their own devices, got into trouble and ended up with juvenile police records."