DEPRIVATION OF MOSCOW

I have been photographing Moscow since February 2022. For me, the city is a stage where a disgusting hypocritical performance unfolds.
My project is called "Deprivation Of Moscow": I capture this city, behind the external well-being of which a deeper reality is hidden.
I deliberately use an old phone and low-quality photos to avoid attachment to the result and to look at things more simply.
I am inspired by post-Soviet art, internal emigration and digital samizdat.
I deny any cooperation with this state, although it creates big financial problems and carries other potential risks. But I hate the Kremlin regime more than I fear it. This project is my way of maintaining inner freedom and a clear conscience: I simply capture reality, showing what I see.



With best regards, RustyMan

In February 2022, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the author began documenting another invasion -- the spiritual occupation of Moscow by its own regime.

"DEPRIVATION OF MOSCOW" became an extensive series of nocturnal photographs of a city gradually transforming into theatrical scenery. The collection comprises over 300 iPhone photographs capturing the spiritual and visual emptiness consuming the Russian capital, where elegant facades crack to reveal the profound void beneath Putin's meticulously constructed simulation of normalcy.

I. PHILOSOPHY OF DISAPPEARANCE

Operating within the Buddhist concept of impermanence, the author deliberately erases digital source files, preserving only Telegram-compressed images. This reflects both the regime's destruction of authentic culture and the practice of renunciation -- refusing to accumulate what can never be eternal.

Moscow exists as a sand mandala: an intricate, deceptive pattern that appears whole from a distance but crumbles into grains under closer examination. Putin's capital appears to be a monumental, complex, monolithic construction, but ultimately proves to be multicolored sand.

The photographs document the beginning of its disintegration, when the city's coherent image still exists, but the grains have already begun to shift.

II. TECHNICAL PHILOSOPHY

The artist photographs exclusively with an iPhone, consciously rejecting the contemporary obsession with image multiplication. This technical minimalism reflects the samizdat tradition: working with available tools under given circumstances. The phone camera becomes an instrument of resistance against aesthetic pretension and authoritarian spectacle.

III. DIGITAL SAMIZDAT

Continuing the lineage of Soviet samizdat, adapted for digital resistance, each photograph represents a challenge to the regime's attempts to control reality itself. In Putin's Russia, even simple documentation becomes subversive activity.

IV. URGENCY OF WITNESS

Given that the project is finite, each photograph can be considered a final testimony. Moscow is disappearing - not physically, but spiritually - through the relentless erasure of authentic human experience and morality.

These photographs will serve as artifacts for future researchers of totalitarian Russia - evidence of how an empire's capital slowly suffocates under its own lies. This documents not Moscow's appearance, but the scene of an unfolding tragedy.

Following the traditions of Walker Evans or Diane Arbus, "DEPRIVATION OF MOSCOW" reveals what Moscow truly represents behind its intricate facades.

The project continues at the intersection of art and survival, documentation and resistance, as long as the artist retains the freedom to witness and the city remains worthy of observation.