The big picture: communal living in modern St Petersburg

During the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks seized the grand private houses in the centre of Moscow and St Petersburg and established each of them as a communal living space for 10 or more families. The kommunalka survived the Soviet years, but after the collapse of communism many were sold off and restored to private ownership. In St Petersburg, in particular, however, a housing crisis meant that a large number of the buildings remained communal. By the time the French photographer Françoise Huguier began to document them in 2001, perhaps 300,000 people still lived in these crumbling houses. Some had been resident since before the war.

Huguier rented a room in one of the buildings and over the following decade lived there on and off for months at a time. She recalled her first night clearly: “Someone was kicking my bedroom door: I woke up with a jolt. It was four in the morning. Two guys holding bottles of vodka insisted we got to know one another. Their room was at the end of the corridor. On the way we bumped into an old woman. With a wave of her hand she seemed to say: don’t worry, I keep watch day and night…”

Huguier produced a book of photographs, some of which feature in a new retrospective of her work, devoted to the idea of “discretion”: the way in which, over time, she and her camera became invisible to her subjects. Huguier lived as an accepted member of the kommunalka, in which strict etiquette still governed the use of communal kitchens, but in which there were also profound issues with poverty and addiction. She took this picture of one of her neighbours in a shared bathroom. As another resident of the block remarked: “We might be only 100 metres from the Hermitage museum, but the bathroom tiles date from the revolution.”

• Discretion, a retrospective of Françoise Huguier’s work, is being shown as part of the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France, 27 August-11 September