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Russian Rust Belt incorporates Alan 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.

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• 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
• Book binding: Emily Macaulay
• Titles typeface: From the collection of Partisan Press, Moscow
• Printers: One Digital, Brighton
• Editor: Alison Bracker