Selected for the official WorldPride 2026 program, “Kidnapping, Caucasian Style” is a photography project by Stefan Ragimov. Drawing on his origins in the Caucasus, Ragimov engages folkloric motifs, cultural archetypes and staged photographic constructions to reconsider visual traditions associated with the region. Through portraits and landscapes, he reconfigures established figures into psychologically nuanced subjects, where masculinity is presented as unstable and internally conflicted.​

The work examines the formation of masculine identity within the Caucasus, shaped by layered structures of tradition, social expectation and inherited ideological frameworks, including historical narratives and contemporary regional attitudes toward gender and sexuality. 

Within this context, the series treats masculinity as something shaped by tension, where authority, fragility and repression coexist. Working between cultural reference and staged construction, Ragimov stays close to the visual language he is drawing from rather than observing it from a distance. Kidnapping, Caucasian Style shifts familiar visual codes and makes space for emotions and expressions that are usually left outside more fixed ways of representing the region.