Background
Bathory was born in Sutton, in Surrey, England.
Bathory was born in Sutton, in Surrey, England.
She graduated from University for the Creative Arts with a first class degree in Graphic Design in June 2006. Between 2008 and 2010 she studied for a master"s degree in Fashion Photography at The London College of Fashion, for which she was awarded a distinction. In 2014 she was awarded a scholarship for a research Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Roehampton to research the photography of dark tourism.
She is known for her series
May 1, 1982. She exhibited her final masters project, Edenias, at London"s Mall Gallery. Struck by the extent of abandonment in the former Soviet Union and what had been its satellite states, Bathory records many abandoned locations within 10 countries, such as forgotten towns, factories, prisons, schools, monuments, hospitals, theatres, military complexes, asylums and death camps, not seen to most people who pass their boarded windows and fenced walls.
These locations are imbued with a wealth of meaning and wonder and a history of their own.
Bathory’s work shines a light on a society shrouded by the cold war, offering a unique and touching document of the daily lives of the Soviet people. Bathory"s photographs show these forgotten historical locations and the ideologies that built them, and try to reawaken old narratives, find beauty and meaning in their decay and revive the memories ingrained in the detritus of a collapsed regime.
The buildings will soon disappear, and as the memory of the former Soviet Union begins to fade, these places and the communities who once gave them life deserve to be recorded for posterity. They tell a story like artefacts in a museum.
The book (published in June 2014 by Carpet Bombing Culture) catches a strange interval between modernity and antiquity.
