Aleksey Myakishev's 'Vyatka' Chronicles Provincial Russia

Aleksey Myakishev's photobook 'Vyatka' captures the quiet, everyday life of provincial Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. Working as a photojournalist for local newspapers in Kirov, northeastern Russia, Myakishev began saving unpublished images that held a deeper, less newsworthy quality. After the 1998 economic crisis, he moved to Moscow to work for Kommersant and Russian Newsweek. A decade later, revisiting negatives from 1994–1999, he discovered forgotten shots and conceived the book. From 2006, he regularly returned to the Kirov region, shooting with a Leica 35mm and black-and-white film, often traveling with a friend in an old car. The resulting book, 'Vyatka,' is a small, tactile, intimate volume printed in 300 copies that quickly sold out. It forms a poetic archive of a Russia rarely depicted with such tenderness in official photojournalism.