Deferred Testimony

Reading time: approximately 10–12 minutes. По-русски

Intro: This week’s note is longer than usual. It is less a news digest than an attempt to describe what has happened to documentary photography and photojournalism in Russia after the collapse of free editorial media.

Photojournalism has not disappeared completely. But it has lost the public space in which it once worked: the newsroom, the assignment, the publication, the immediate public response. Documentary photography survives differently now — in archives, books, small exhibitions, émigré media, private projects, educational spaces, and in images that often cannot yet be properly published.

I call this condition deferred testimony: photographs made in the present, but addressed to a future in which they may finally be read openly.

A Profession Without an Editorial Desk

Documentary photography in Russia is alive. But photojournalism as a free editorial profession is gravely ill.

It has not disappeared; rather, it has broken down into several forms of existence: state or semi-state photojournalism, museum and gallery photography, independent documentary work, regional private archives, émigré projects, and cautious publications in independent Russian-language media outside Russia.

Here it is important to distinguish between two things. Photojournalism depends on editorial offices, assignments, publication, public response, and the right to bear witness in real time. Documentary photography can live longer and more quietly — in an archive, a book, an exhibition, a personal project, or an educational environment. This is why the former is almost paralysed in Russia, while the latter continues to exist, changing its form.

The classical model of photojournalism — “editorial desk → assignment → photographer → publication → public response” — no longer functions properly inside Russia. The reason is not the absence of photographers, whether they have left or stayed, but the destruction of independent media infrastructure.

In its 2026 index, RSF ranks Russia 172nd out of 180 countries. After the invasion of Ukraine, almost all independent media were banned, blocked, designated as “foreign agents,” or declared “undesirable organizations.” Those that remain operate under conditions of wartime censorship. The dissemination of “false information” about the Russian armed forces is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

In other words, the problem is not that photographers have stopped seeing. The problem is that public testimony has become legally dangerous — especially when it concerns war, the army, mobilization, protests, prisons, state violence, LGBTQ issues, religion, “offending religious feelings,” psychiatry, and closed institutions.

This does not mean that everything is impossible. It means that documentary photography has become either coded, or “non-political,” or deferred into the archive until better times — times that, in Russia, are dreamed of not only by photographers.

The Permitted Image

Inside Russia, a large visual machine remains in place — agencies, state media, regional publications, press offices, corporate media. But for the most part this is the production of a permitted image, not independent photojournalism.

A telling example of this state infrastructure is the Andrei Stenin Contest. In 2026, entries opened for the 12th International Photo Contest organized by Rossiya Segodnya. The editor-in-chief of the media group is Margarita Simonyan. In other words, the official form of photojournalism still exists, but it has been absorbed into the state’s cultural and informational system.

The form of photojournalism has been preserved, but its public function has been severely damaged. Or, as journalists in Amsterdam might say in such cases: Het is echt klote.

Independent Russian-language journalism, where genuine documentary photography might still have found a place, has largely moved into exile, Telegram, YouTube, newsletters, special projects, and text-based journalistic formats.

There is still a visual dimension there, but often not in the form of a full photo essay or photo reportage. More often, images function as illustration, archive material, screenshots, video fragments, satellite images, maps, or documents. The photo story and the photo reportage, as distinct editorial genres, have become rare.

From “Doc” Toward “Art”

The situation with museums and visual institutions has held up somewhat better since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The museum and educational infrastructure for photography in Russia has not disappeared entirely.

MAMM in Moscow continues its exhibition and educational activity. Its current 2026 programme includes exhibitions of contemporary art, multimedia, and visual projects, while established institutional lines also remain in place — the Photobiennale, Fashion and Style in Photography, and the Rodchenko School.

The question is different: agendas and themes are carefully aligned with the state’s understanding of cultural and social issues — even before one takes into account the self-censorship of art historians, curators, and directors of visual institutions.

But this is no longer an environment in which documentary photography naturally connects with journalism. Rather, it is translated into the language of contemporary art: the project, the installation, the archive, the object, the artist’s book, the research of memory.

This can be a powerful format. But direct social reportage often loses its sharpness and urgency there, or passes through an aesthetic, neutralising frame imposed by the managers of art.

ROSFOTO in St Petersburg also remains an important institution. The State Museum and Exhibition Centre continues to organise exhibitions, archival projects, and educational programmes. It is an important place for photography as cultural memory, but not for living, conflict-driven photojournalism in the Western sense.

Here I can give a personal example. At the managerial level, I was invited to hold a photo exhibition based on my book project Calamity Islands / Sakhalin and the Kurils — Terra Incognita of a Brutal Russian Empire. The project combines photographs made for a book inspired by Anton Chekhov, essays by well-known historians and journalists, and my own photographs of contemporary life in Russia’s island territories.

But after ROSFOTO’s leadership examined my biography and civic position, the exhibition was categorically refused — despite the rather “romantic” appearance of the contemporary photographs, which seemed to be simply about “fishermen and fish.”

Provincial Refuges

It is worth noting another tendency as well. Since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, public private galleries in Moscow have begun to close, but their afterlives can now be found in “Moscow apartment exhibitions” — and even in provincial cities, such as Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl region.

Thus, Krista Gallery, created within a major Russian IT company, has over the past four years organised dozens of exhibitions by well-known Moscow and Russian photographers working in photojournalism and documentary photography.

What does this look like in practice? Surprisingly strange.

You arrive in the godforsaken town of Rybinsk, take a taxi — preferably — to its outskirts, and discover, to your surprise: first, a huge building; second, a large number of cars around it; and third, young people — the kind you rarely see in such numbers, and in one place, in provincial Russia.

Then it gets even more interesting. You enter through the main entrance and see a turnstile and a security guard. Don’t be afraid — just ask him:

“Where is the photo gallery?”

And the security guard will answer very politely:

“Turn right, through the locked door. Take the key. When you go in, switch on the lights on the right. When you’ve seen the exhibition, turn the lights off and bring the keys back to me.”

An algorithm of politeness, as in IT.

Schools, Relocation, Online

FotoDepartament in St Petersburg is one sign that the field is not dead. It continues to describe itself as an institution working with contemporary photography “in the context of art, media, and digital culture,” and speaks about the restructuring of the photography industry, the career of the author, an educational platform, a reading room, a bookshop, and a gallery.

It has a space in the Berthold Center, a library, a photobook shop, and projects planned for 2026. At the same time, unofficial sources point to the existence there — if not of censorship, then of self-censorship, which in some cases may be far more comprehensive than Glavlit, the Soviet censorship authority.

The Rodchenko School, where I once taught a course in documentary photography, also continues to function as an educational and exhibition environment. Its website lists full-time programmes, courses, events, competitions and grants, regional programmes, and the optimistically titled prize Life Ahead.

But at the Rodchenko School, documentary photography survives not as a photojournalistic profession, but as an authorial practice. In other words, the photographer is no longer necessarily oriented toward working for a newspaper or magazine. Instead, the work may take the form of a project, a book, an exhibition, a zine, an archive, an installation, an educational course, or an online publication.

I should add that this practice already existed during my documentary course at the School in 2009–2012, although at that time the reasons were entirely different.

Almost all private photography schools have moved online — among them Docdocdoc and the Fotografika Academy — because some of their teachers and students have relocated. Others have closed completely, such as the School of Visual Arts in Moscow.

Artyom Chernov’s Fotopoligon continues to operate from Montenegro: it runs its traditional courses in the fundamentals of composition and also organises photo tours, bringing together audiences both from Russia and from the relocated Russian-speaking community in different countries.

Photobook and Zine as a Form of Survival

In my view, the photobook and the zine have become one of the main ways in which Russian documentary photography survives. This is especially important in a situation where media outlets cannot, or do not want to, publish long visual stories.

A book allows testimony to be preserved, to bypass the immediate censorship of the news cycle, and to move the work into an archival and cultural layer.

A telling example is Evgeny Feldman. He worked with political and social photography, published photobooks and zines in Moscow, left Russia after a wave of repression, served as photo editor at Meduza, and in 2025 published the documentary photo album This Is Navalny. Shortly afterward, he was added by the Russian Ministry of Justice to the register of “foreign agents.”

This is an important symptom: a significant part of living Russian photojournalism now exists either outside Russia, or on the border between archive, samizdat, and political risk.

Deferred Testimony

Is documentary photography — and photojournalism — still alive? Yes, it is. But not where people usually look for it.

It is barely alive in the daily Russian press as a free public institution.

It is alive in personal archives, regional work, photobooks, author-led projects, émigré media, small exhibitions, Telegram channels, educational environments, museum programmes, and in works that, for now, cannot be properly published.

The main genre of Russian documentary photography today is neither reportage nor even the photo story, but deferred testimony.

Photographers continue to work, but often cannot publicly call things by their proper names. As a result, a strange form emerges: documentary photography without a full verbal document — or sometimes without a caption at all.

Photography in today’s Russia is increasingly forced to speak silently. One striking example is the photographer Emil Gataullin, whose remarkably courageous photographs speak about everyday life in contemporary Russia.

Photo + Text + Investigation

From this week’s international overview, I noted only the Kapuściński Prize for war and humanitarian journalism — and for a reason.

It is not exactly a prize for photographers, but it sends an important signal: strong documentary photography is increasingly being assessed in connection with text, investigation, and long-form humanitarian reporting.

Today, it is no longer necessary to define oneself only as a photographer. It may be more precise to say: documentary photographer / researcher — or even long-form visual storyteller.

That is why, for me, the international news of the week is that journalist Lorenzo Tondo and photographer Alessio Mamo — working as a pair, as in the old days — received the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize for their reporting from war zones and humanitarian crises. The award ceremony is scheduled to take place in Rome on June 12.

In conclusion, I would note that The Guardian, in my view, remains one of the few major international publications where photojournalism and documentary photography still exist as an independent editorial value. My thanks to its photo desk for its remarkable visual policy — and personally to Head of Photography Fiona Shields.

Oleg Klimov
long-form visual storyteller ;)

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