“I love horses almost as much as I love photography and, in another life, I would have been a professional rider,” says Anastasia Taylor-Lind. “With your own stories, it’s so important to go and discover what you want to see.”

So, following her own advice, she recently spent five weeks in southern Russia and parts of Ukraine to shoot a story on Cossack revivalism, photographing across 15 locations, including some of the cadet schools that have sprung up teaching traditional skills such as martial arts, folk dancing and horse riding to a new generation learning about their cultural heritage, once suppressed by the Soviet regime.

One of the schools she chose is the Ataman Platov school near Rostov-on-Don, which is the only one that accepts girls as full-time boarders and – having previously shot long-term projects on Kurdish women fighting in the PKK armies in Iraq, and young Russians training to be models – she’s become fascinated by female-dominated societies and their nuances.

Taylor-Lind spent a week at the school, sleeping in one of the girls’ dorms, eating alongside them and going to their lessons. “I was worried they would think I was ancient, but they didn’t seem to notice,” says the 29-year-old Swindon-born photographer, who now bases herself in Beirut. She took the pictures using a 6×6 Bronica with a waist-level finder, which allowed her to build rapport with the girls while shooting.

“You don’t put anything in front of your face when you take a picture, so it’s much less disruptive than shooting 35mm,” she says, adding that she was fascinated by the sense of toughness and femininity portrayed by the girls and their female tutors, who insist that Cossack women must be sexy as well as militarily trained. Her image of the karate tutor of another school [first picture, above], for example, shows her in her kitchen, still wearing her uniform but also sporting pink lipstick that matches her wallpaper.

In the UK, Marie Claire has picked up on the project, (which was funded by a £2000 bursary she received after winning last year’s Guardian/Royal Photographic Society Joan Wakelin Award) and will publish it in its April edition, having also been the first magazine to run a major story based on her pictures when it ran the PKK photographs.

She regular shoots for Geo in Germany, (which recently commissioned her for a 20-day story in Egypt) as well as for NGOs such as Comic Relief. She also joined the mentor scheme at VII Photo last year, which she says has changed her life.

“I used to make a project, pitch it to my contacts and be happy if I sold it once,” she says. “Now, if I make a project, I know it’s going to be sold five or six times. It’s meant that my income has become a little more regular – I just have to keep it rolling.”