At the beginning of 2020, I started to work with GIGNOUXPHOTOS studio and Stanley James Press to create a RUSSIAN RUST BELT photobook. I worked on creative concepts and photo editing. It was the main project I focused on, with the studio whilst indoors, surviving the pandemic. It was an intense time, we spent hours researching old Russian photobooks and editing thousands of photographs taken by Alan Gignoux whilst he was in residence with the NCAA in Yekaterinburg in 2009. Whilst making this book, the Russians invaded Ukraine, and we all struggled with the fact that we were making a book about RUSSIA whilst the war was happening, costing the lives of so many people. It felt really hard to persevere, we spent lots of time thinking should we carry on?

The book is about everyday people like you and I and how politics affect us, so we felt we should persist. We also worked with Anthony Burrill on the typography who sourced the letterpress from Partisan Press in Moscow which was shut down briefly for pasting up STOP THE WAR posters across the city.

Over the last year and a half, we have taken the book dummy to different book festivals: Fiebre Madrid, Bop Martin Parr Foundation, Thousandfold book Fair Koln, and Aarhus photobook week Denmark IN 2022 as well as a soft launch at Photo Ireland this year. The feedback has been really interesting - many people felt they knew very little about Russia and the pre-orders started to come in.

We made 100 first editions and I have 10 for sale.

The exceptional mineral wealth in the Urals has provided the resources for Russia’s economic development and military defence for over 300 years. In the twentieth century, the region became central to Stalin’s plans to modernise the Soviet Union and drive the transition to a world-class industrial economy.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the people of the Urals were left to endure the punishing legacy of the Soviet industrial project: failing industries, abandoned factories, outdated, and dilapidated industrial equipment, decaying housing, job losses, population loss and life-threatening environmental degradation.  Russia’s crucible had become the nation’s rust belt.

Russian Rust Belt incorporates Gignoux’s photographs of the Ural industrial region taken during a residency with the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg in 2009.  The design of the book takes as its inspiration the Soviet-era photobooks produced between 1920 and 1941.

Soviet photobooks used cutting-edge design features, such as bold and original typography and graphic devices, wallpapers, fabric inserts, photomontage, cut-outs, overlays, gatefold pages, extended foldouts, and half pages, to impressive effect, creating inspirational, modern, confident books that reflected and celebrated a shared Utopian vision.

Russian Rust Belt deconstructs those devices to reflect the dismantling of the Soviet project, and the resulting impact on the people living with that legacy, visualized in response to a series of words: fracture, rupture, shatter, splinter, decay, corrode, crumble, fall apart.  The photobook aims to embody in terms of design, form, and content the Russian rust belt experience, with its specific Soviet and post-Soviet character.

Edition of 100

186 x 277mm

Handbound

264 pages including foldout pages distributed throughout the book

182 colour photos in total (excluding covers)

4 colour “wallpaper” pages

1 foldout montage

ISBN: 978-1-9999610-6-0

Photographer: Alan Gignoux

Essay and texts: Jenny Christensson

Photo editors: Alan Gignoux, Chloe Juno, and Jenny Christensson

Designers: Emily Macaulay at Stanley James Press, Chloe Juno, and Jenny Christensson

Photomontage and wallpapers: Emily Macaulay

Typography: Anthony Burrill

Front and back cover screen print: Another Fine Mesh, Lewes

Bookbinding: Emily Macaulay

Titles typeface: From the collection of Partisan Press, Moscow

Printers: One Digital, Brighton

Editor: Alison Bracker