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In Cruise, Ieva Raudsepa documents a group of young party-goers on board the Riga-Stockholm ferry. In her series, the crossing appears more than simply a space of unfettered freedom, but a place of limbo for Latvia’s post-independence generation to contemplate its future. 

There’s a familiar nostalgia to Latvian-born Ieva Raudsepa’s photos in her series Cruise – we experience an uncanny sense that we too were there, doing handstands under bunting and refilling our plastic cup with vodka and Coke. Her photos are free and unselfconscious, snapshots of fleeting moments as opposed to staged performances. Published by Baltic-based Milda Books, Cruise was shot on board the Riga-Stockholm ferry, an overnight journey popular with Latvia’s youth for its cheap fare and promise of uninhibited freedom. There is a disco ball, karaoke and all the clichéd trappings of glossy cruise culture juxtaposed against the minimalist beauty of the sea. A child of Latvia’s post-Soviet generation, Raudsepa seeks out moments and moods that convey transition, contrast and contradiction – an impulse also present in her series Bloom (2017), a study of changing Latvian identity. Her work is both lens and mirror to these spaces, between past and present, East and West, youth and adulthood. ◉