If I may save time in a photograph Meduza interviews photographer Sergey Maximishin about his two-volume farewell to Russia and a century of historical past captured in his work and beginner pictures

In December 2025, the Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin launched a two-volume album titled “Rodina” (Motherland). The first quantity consists of beginner images from completely different years — pictures Maximishin has collected at flea markets and auctions. The second quantity is a retrospective assortment of the photographer’s personal work. In 2022, Maximishin, whose mom is Ukrainian, left Russia for Israel. At Meduza’s request, journalist Alexander Urzhanov spoke with Maximishin about what “motherland” means to him.

— Your two-volume set spans precisely 105 years of Russian historical past in images, from 1917 to 2022. Is this your manner of saying that right this moment’s battle in Ukraine is a historic dividing line comparable in scale to the Bolshevik Revolution? Is Russia now a completely different nation — one thing for various images?

— I simply left Russia, so the break occurred naturally. For me, this e book is a manner of closing that chapter, as a result of I don’t suppose I’ll ever shoot in Russia once more. Even if I went again, I don’t suppose I’d nonetheless be in a position to do it. So in a manner, that is me taking inventory. It’s 27 years of work. There had been years once I was a newspaper reporter. There had been years once I labored for National Geographic and GEO. Now I’m doing it for my personal Facebook web page and simply capturing what pursuits me.

— Out of such an monumental physique of pictures, how did you determine what to embrace in the e book?

— We picked every part along with the editor, Andrey Polikanov. He’s a legend in our area. We went with images that we suppose nonetheless matter right this moment. We principally ditched the information photographs — I had tons of them — and stored those that felt tied to that phrase “Motherland.”

— Does the title sound provocative to you?

— Why would it? There’s nothing provocative about it. “Motherland” is simply the nation I love, the place I come from. Sure, I have [Friedrich] Dürrenmatt in the again of my thoughts when it involves the state and the motherland. But there’s no sarcasm right here, no hidden barb.

I actually didn’t need to make a e book pushed by present occasions. One manner I decide a photographer’s success is whether or not their images will nonetheless be attention-grabbing 50 years from now, after all of the information has been forgotten. I began considering that, for a photographer, time is like canning tomatoes. We protect time in jars, utilizing completely different recipes, whether or not it’s in their very own juice or in a marinade, with extra or much less vinegar. But they’re nonetheless tomatoes. And that’s mainly the mission.

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— The first quantity of Rodina consists of images from private archives, taken between 1917 and the late Eighties. How did you acquire this beginner images?

— It’s folks images. That’s what I name it. I haven’t actually heard anybody else use that time period. Professionals say “vernacular photography,” some say “private,” however “folk” feels nearer to me — like a folks track.

I solely began accumulating images like this about 12 years in the past. Before that, I was all the time accumulating one thing, like cash. Since I’m from Kerch, I collected Kerch cash, that are an historic forex. Back in faculty, I wished to be an archaeologist. Working with this type of images is mainly archaeology. In massive batches, although, it’s extremely boring. It’s clichéd and repetitive, but when you sift by means of sufficient of it, now and again you discover a actual pearl.

People who cope with this type of images from an ethnographic angle generally get irritated by it. They don’t just like the method. They say it isn’t scientific: “You’re just doing self-presentation, turning other people’s photos into your own art project.” And, yeah, mainly that’s true. I by no means promised anybody I’d be doing educational work. 

Really, that is my personal tackle the large physique of Soviet vernacular images. It’s a image of the nation as I see it. [Journalist] Shura Burtin put it completely: “It feels like you’re photographing with someone else’s photos.” Artist [and Rodina designer] Zhenya Korneev mentioned the identical factor the primary time he noticed the e book: “It feels like you took these photos yourself.” That’s as a result of I’m a photographer, and I can’t get previous my personal sense of what makes a photograph good or unhealthy. My choice is clearly very subjective.

In sensible phrases, it labored like this: I’d go on-line, scroll by means of flea-market websites, discover auctions, after which get into these fierce bidding wars with 10 different individuals world wide who wished the identical photograph. Sometimes I gained. Sometimes I misplaced. Sometimes I picked one thing up for subsequent to nothing; generally I paid 3 times over. I have every part in onerous copy, and actually, it’s an unbelievable feeling if you lastly get a image like that. They’re all tiny — 9 by twelve at most — rolled up, soiled, and torn. You take this little factor that appears completely unimpressive, put it in the scanner, and all of the sudden it exhibits up on the display screen. It’ll provide you with goosebumps.

— Every period has its personal visible stereotypes: in the Soviet Thirties, it’s physical-fitness parades; in the Nineteen Forties, tears; in the Nineteen Sixties, individuals residing their personal lives. In what methods does your archive of “folk photography” align with these stereotypes, and in what methods does it problem them?

— The stereotype didn’t simply come from nowhere. We didn’t retouch or crop the images. The solely factor we generally did was blow up components of them. We did that when a massive enlargement mainly turned it right into a new {photograph}. There’s a shot of women at a physical-culture parade, and they’re tennis gamers from the Dynamo membership. When you zoom in, you see there’s a police officer standing behind every one.

At the identical time, the Thirties additionally had eroticism, which is onerous to image now. Naturally, I wished to embrace images that mess a bit with the stage-managed stereotypes.

— Many of the images in the primary quantity look fairly avant-garde. A skilled photographer does that on goal, breaking guidelines they know completely properly. But what about an beginner?

— There’s this unbelievable photograph in the e book: a sailor shot in a distinctly Rodchenko-style low-angle composition. It’s dated 1937 and was taken in a park in Donetsk. So you’ve acquired some random avenue photographer working straight out of Rodchenko’s playbook at a time when Rodchenko himself had already stopped working like that. After he was taken down a peg [by being publicly accused of plagiarizing Western art] — happily with out being jailed — Rodchenko largely switched to a conventional method, abandoning these stylistic prospers.

Or take one other beautiful {photograph} — a little one’s funeral, virtually Renaissance in its composition. It even has a metaphor: a terrifying girl in black stands behind them, ready, her lips pressed tight. And the youngsters react to the demise in other ways; some get it, some don’t. It was photographed someplace in a village. Did the photographer know he’d created a masterpiece? I don’t know.

It additionally comes right down to the character of the fabric. Big-time photographers shot big-time issues. They weren’t enthusiastic about something outdoors the stereotype as a result of they had been those creating it. Smaller photographers, who didn’t fear about censorship or self-censorship since they weren’t doing it for publication, photographed no matter they noticed. That’s why we get these wonderful scenes: nails bought individually, for instance. Picnics, tea consuming — on a regular basis stuff that by no means confirmed up in the work of [Boris] Ignatovich, Rodchenko, [Arkady] Shaikhet, [Max] Alpert, and others like them.

I knew I couldn’t stray too removed from the stereotype. But I nonetheless wished to present that issues had been a bit extra advanced.

— The second quantity of Rodina consists of your personal images, however its chapters are organized not chronologically, however geographically into South, North, West, East, after which “The Capitals.” And it appears that roughly half of the “South” chapter is dedicated to chronicling the battle in Chechnya. Was {that a} acutely aware resolution?

— I don’t suppose it was a acutely aware resolution. There had been simply images of mine that I couldn’t pass over of my personal retrospective e book. I’m not a battle photographer, and for me, battle was — in some sense — form of a boyish impulse, a strategy to take a look at myself. Professionally, I remorse a lot as a result of again then, I was nonetheless a awful photographer and didn’t seize many issues.

I’ve by no means seen something extra horrific than Grozny in the winter of 2000. A few of us journalists got here in with the primary truck carrying humanitarian assist: two guys from Australia, [fellow photographer Yuri] Kozyrev — my buddy and mentor — and me. We noticed individuals crawling out of basements they hadn’t left for six months. Dogs from one basement would keep near the individuals from that very same basement and wouldn’t go close to the canine from one other, as a result of they’d mainly fused with the people they lived with. It was insufferable to watch. I suppose I could have one or two images that convey this. And I suppose that in any battle, that is what it’s like, simply an unnatural state for society.

— After the south, north, east, and west, there’s a complete separate world — the “Capitals” chapter. It was curious to not see the newly “beautified” Sobyanin-era capital there at all.

— Yeah, that’s unlucky. It’s simply because as soon as I stopped working with the press, I mainly stopped capturing in the capitals altogether. I was touring round small cities with college students as a substitute.

— But that’s precisely what I preferred about it: the e book focuses on tales that often stay on the margins. For me, it mattered extra that the Moscow part isn’t about Gorky Park, however about children with Down syndrome.

— There’s one photograph there that, to me, is completely about Moscow: individuals in black fits hovering over the town on a cable elevate. You can’t inform if they’re safety guards or some form of businessmen. Just individuals floating above the capital — form of humorous, form of creepy.

After the photograph was printed, they tracked me down, wrote me a letter, and thanked me. I requested, “So who are you guys, where are you from?” They mentioned, “We’re from Ryazan. We were in town for a wedding.”

— Flipping by means of the second quantity, I realized I’d seen a number of of these images tons of instances earlier than — in galleries, on random websites, in the darker corners of the Internet, as memes, in super-compressed, endlessly re-saved JPEGs. I had no concept they had been yours.

— You don’t have any concept how good that’s to hear. It’s the very best factor a photographer can hear. What’s a actually nice photograph? When it escapes the tight orbit of professionals and aficionados and makes its manner into the world at giant — the way in which Che Guevara’s portrait did. I suppose that once I’m gone, solely these photos will final; every part else will fade into the background. I ask myself on a regular basis what number of images like that I have. I suppose no greater than 5: Putin, the gold tooth…

— And Norilsk.

— There was this complete factor with that. I gained the “Best Photographer of Russia” award for these images, and it was reported in every single place that the prize was $10,000. People in Norilsk had been outraged. In native on-line teams, they wrote, “If that bastard comes back, we’ll make him eat those photos.” And this occurs on a regular basis: you present up someplace in bother, individuals go on about how unhealthy issues are, and also you actually need to {photograph} it to assist. But after they see images taken by another person, they get offended.

Norilsk is mainly a treasure trove. Any photographer who goes there comes again with some form of trophy — a e book, a prize — as I did — or even a World Press Photo award. It’s an unbelievably photogenic place, sadly. Generally talking, struggling is a lot extra photogenic than pleasure.

— Let’s put aside what you probably did {photograph} and discuss as a substitute about what you didn’t. The most up-to-date images in Rodina are from 2022. Do you’re feeling like Russia has modified visually since then?

— Honestly, hardly anybody is photographing Russia proper now. Basically, there are simply two individuals nonetheless doing it, Emil Gataullin and Sasha Gronsky. For them, it’s form of a mission. They each may’ve left, however stayed. In a manner, they’re doing what I ought to have been doing. For me, although, the query of leaving by no means actually got here up, as a result of I’m half Ukrainian. My mother taught Ukrainian, and it’s my native language.

What I see in a lot of photos from Russia is this: certain, individuals spotlight the adjustments which have occurred — the floor symbols. But if you flip away from these indicators, I don’t suppose something has actually modified, or will anytime quickly. It’s nonetheless a massive, inert nation. The discuss may be completely different. But the large image adjustments rather more slowly.