If I could save time in a photo

Meduza interviews photographer Sergey Maximishin about his two-volume farewell to Russia and a century of history captured in his work and amateur images

In December 2025, the Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin released a two-volume album titled “Rodina” (Motherland). The first volume consists of amateur photographs from different years — images Maximishin has collected at flea markets and auctions. The second volume is a retrospective collection of the photographer’s own work. In 2022, Maximishin, whose mother 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 exactly 105 years of Russian history in photographs, from 1917 to 2022. Is this your way of saying that today’s war in Ukraine is a historical dividing line comparable in scale to the Bolshevik Revolution? Is Russia now a different country — something for different photographs?

— I just left Russia, so the break happened naturally. For me, this book is a way of closing that chapter, because I don’t think I’ll ever shoot in Russia again. Even if I went back, I don’t think I’d still be able to do it. So in a way, this is me taking stock. It’s 27 years of work. There were years when I was a newspaper reporter. There were years when I worked for National Geographic and GEO. Now I’m doing it for my own Facebook page and just shooting what interests me.

— Out of such an enormous body of images, how did you decide what to include in the book?

— We picked everything together with the editor, Andrey Polikanov. He’s a legend in our field. We went with photos that we think still matter today. We mostly ditched the news shots — I had tons of them — and kept the ones that felt tied to that word “Motherland.”

— Does the title sound provocative to you?

— Why would it? There’s nothing provocative about it. “Motherland” is just the country I love, the place I come from. Sure, I have [Friedrich] Dürrenmatt in the back of my mind when it comes to the state and the motherland. But there’s no sarcasm here, no hidden barb.

I really didn’t want to make a book driven by current events. One way I judge a photographer’s success is whether their photos will still be interesting 50 years from now, after all the news has been forgotten. I started thinking that, for a photographer, time is like canning tomatoes. We preserve time in jars, using different recipes, whether it’s in their own juice or in a marinade, with more or less vinegar. But they’re still tomatoes. And that’s basically the mission.

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— The first volume of Rodina consists of photos from personal archives, taken between 1917 and the late 1980s. How did you collect this amateur photography?

— It’s folk photography. That’s what I call it. I haven’t really heard anyone else use that term. Professionals say “vernacular photography,” some say “private,” but “folk” feels closer to me — like a folk song.

I only started collecting photos like this about 12 years ago. Before that, I was always collecting something, like coins. Since I’m from Kerch, I collected Kerch coins, which are an ancient currency. Back in school, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Working with this kind of photography is basically archaeology. In big batches, though, it’s incredibly boring. It’s clichéd and repetitive, but if you sift through enough of it, every now and then you find a real pearl.

People who deal with this kind of photography from an ethnographic angle sometimes get annoyed by it. They don’t like the approach. They say it isn’t scientific: “You’re just doing self-presentation, turning other people’s photos into your own art project.” And, yeah, basically that’s true. I never promised anyone I’d be doing academic work.

Really, this is my own take on the huge body of Soviet vernacular photography. It’s a picture of the country as I see it. [Journalist] Shura Burtin put it perfectly: “It feels like you’re photographing with someone else’s photos.” Artist [and Rodina designer] Zhenya Korneev said the same thing the first time he saw the book: “It feels like you took these photos yourself.” That’s because I’m a photographer, and I can’t get past my own sense of what makes a photo good or bad. My selection is obviously very subjective.

In practical terms, it worked like this: I’d go online, scroll through flea-market sites, find auctions, and then get into these fierce bidding wars with 10 other people around the world who wanted the same photo. Sometimes I won. Sometimes I lost. Sometimes I picked something up for next to nothing; sometimes I paid three times over. I have everything in hard copy, and honestly, it’s an incredible feeling when you finally get a picture like that. They’re all tiny — nine by twelve at most — rolled up, dirty, and torn. You take this little thing that looks totally unimpressive, put it in the scanner, and suddenly it shows up on the screen. It’ll give you goosebumps.

— Every era has its own visual stereotypes: in the Soviet 1930s, it’s physical-fitness parades; in the 1940s, tears; in the 1960s, people living their private lives. In what ways does your archive of “folk photography” align with these stereotypes, and in what ways does it challenge them?

— The stereotype didn’t just come from nowhere. We didn’t retouch or crop the photos. The only thing we sometimes did was blow up parts of them. We did that when a big enlargement basically turned it into a new photograph. There’s a shot of girls at a physical-culture parade, and they are tennis players from the Dynamo club. When you zoom in, you see there’s a police officer standing behind each one.

At the same time, the 1930s also had eroticism, which is hard to picture now. Naturally, I wanted to include photos that mess a bit with the stage-managed stereotypes.

— Many of the photographs in the first volume look quite avant-garde. A professional photographer does that on purpose, breaking rules they know perfectly well. But what about an amateur?

— There’s this incredible photo in the 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 got some random street 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] — fortunately without being jailed — Rodchenko largely switched to a traditional approach, abandoning those stylistic flourishes.

Or take another stunning photograph — a child’s funeral, almost Renaissance in its composition. It even has a metaphor: a terrifying woman in black stands behind them, waiting, her lips pressed tight. And the children react to the death in different ways; some get it, some don’t. It was photographed somewhere in a village. Did the photographer know he’d created a masterpiece? I don’t know.

It also comes down to the nature of the material. Big-time photographers shot big-time things. They weren’t interested in anything outside the stereotype because they were the ones creating it. Smaller photographers, who didn’t worry about censorship or self-censorship since they weren’t doing it for publication, photographed whatever they saw. That’s why we get these amazing scenes: nails sold individually, for example. Picnics, tea drinking — everyday stuff that never showed up in the work of [Boris] Ignatovich, Rodchenko, [Arkady] Shaikhet, [Max] Alpert, and others like them.

I knew I couldn’t stray too far from the stereotype. But I still wanted to show that things were a bit more complex.

— The second volume of Rodina consists of your own photographs, but its chapters are organized not chronologically, but geographically into South, North, West, East, and then “The Capitals.” And it seems that roughly half of the “South” chapter is devoted to chronicling the war in Chechnya. Was that a conscious decision?

— I don’t think it was a conscious decision. There were just photographs of mine that I couldn’t leave out of my own retrospective book. I’m not a war photographer, and for me, war was — in some sense — kind of a boyish impulse, a way to test myself. Professionally, I regret a lot because back then, I was still a lousy photographer and failed to capture many things.

I’ve never seen anything more horrific than Grozny in the winter of 2000. A few of us journalists came in with the first truck carrying humanitarian aid: two guys from Australia, [fellow photographer Yuri] Kozyrev — my friend and mentor — and me. We saw people crawling out of basements they hadn’t left for six months. Dogs from one basement would stay close to the people from that same basement and wouldn’t go near the dogs from another, because they’d basically fused with the humans they lived with. It was unbearable to watch. I think I may have one or two photographs that convey this. And I think that in any war, this is what it’s like, just an unnatural state for society.

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

— Yeah, that’s unfortunate. It’s just because once I stopped working with the press, I basically stopped shooting in the capitals altogether. I was traveling around small towns with students instead.

— But that’s exactly what I liked about it: the book focuses on stories that usually remain on the margins. For me, it mattered more that the Moscow section isn’t about Gorky Park, but about kids with Down syndrome.

— There’s one photo there that, to me, is totally about Moscow: people in black suits soaring over the city on a cable lift. You can’t tell if they’re security guards or some kind of businessmen. Just people floating above the capital — kind of funny, kind of creepy.

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

— Flipping through the second volume, I realized I’d seen several of these photos tons of times before — in galleries, on random sites, in the darker corners of the Internet, as memes, in super-compressed, endlessly re-saved JPEGs. I had no idea they were yours.

— You have no idea how good that is to hear. It’s the best thing a photographer can hear. What’s a truly great photo? When it escapes the tight orbit of professionals and aficionados and makes its way into the world at large — the way Che Guevara’s portrait did. I think that when I’m gone, only those pictures will last; everything else will fade into the background. I ask myself all the time how many photos like that I have. I think no more than five: Putin, the gold teeth…

— And Norilsk.

— There was this whole thing with that. I won the “Best Photographer of Russia” award for those photos, and it was reported everywhere that the prize was $10,000. People in Norilsk were outraged. In local online groups, they wrote, “If that bastard comes back, we’ll make him eat those photos.” And this happens all the time: you show up somewhere in trouble, people go on about how bad things are, and you honestly want to photograph it to help. But when they see photos taken by someone else, they get angry.

Norilsk is basically a treasure trove. Any photographer who goes there comes back with some kind of trophy — a book, a prize — as I did — or even a World Press Photo award. It’s an unbelievably photogenic place, unfortunately. Generally speaking, suffering is a lot more photogenic than joy.

— Let’s set aside what you did photograph and talk instead about what you didn’t. The most recent photos in Rodina are from 2022. Do you feel like Russia has changed visually since then?

— Honestly, hardly anyone is photographing Russia right now. Basically, there are just two people still doing it, Emil Gataullin and Sasha Gronsky. For them, it’s kind of a mission. They both could’ve left, but stayed. In a way, they’re doing what I should have been doing. For me, though, the question of leaving never really came up, because I’m half Ukrainian. My mom taught Ukrainian, and it’s my native language.

What I see in a lot of pictures from Russia is this: sure, people highlight the changes that have happened — the surface symbols. But if you turn away from those signs, I don’t think anything has really changed, or will anytime soon. It’s still a big, inert country. The talk might be different. But the big picture changes much more slowly.

Interview by Alexander Urzhanov