Photographer Captures the Decadence and Conflict of Russia’s Turbulent 2010s

A lot of photographers have tried to capture the peculiarities of Russia’s day-to-day life, but no-one does quite like Konstantin Tishshe. The Ural-based independent photographer documents the ambivalent reality of the 2010s and the unconventional beauty of coming of age in Russia’s outskirts. The teenagers he documents — idealist, quixotic and lost — are in constant search of connection, whether through a smartphone or at wild house parties.

He started his eponymous Tishshe almost a decade ago, when he turned to photography in an attempt to capture the decadence, idealism, resistance, and social conflict he encountered both in his hometown of Beryozovsky — a small industrial town close to the Ural city of Yekaterinburg — and across the country as a whole.

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Tishshe, the Russian word for “be quiet”, is an appropriately sarcastic response to the oppression that takes place in Russia.

“The concept of a foreign enemy, propagandised by the Russian authorities, is manifested in ubiquitous fences that turn the streets into prison corridors of some sort. Fences and gates are details of a bigger system, the inhabitable fear,” Tishshe comments.