After a few hours of wandering around the site, Ortiz Monasterio was amazed and asked to come back. This time, Moscow acquiesced, and for about a week, Ortiz Monasterio visited every day, snapping photographs of what was once the world’s largest particle collider, along with beautiful contraptions of mysterious purpose. The resulting images will appear in the book “Akademgorodok,” to be published next week by the imprint RM/Conaculta, which is based in Mexico City. Much of what Ortiz Monasterio captured – the nests of wires, the steel drums and tubing – he only somewhat understood, and the machines in his images often seem to have taken over, trapping the scientists in cages of pre-Internet technology.

Yet in his view, the laboratories of Akademgorodok are in fact testaments to the sheer force of human will and curiosity. “It’s not the kind of lab that Hollywood has produced for our imagination, with everything white and clean,” he said. “It has the feeling of a taller de automovíles here in Mexico.”

“It’s chaotic,” he continued, “but all of that creates a collectivity that’s working there. How did these scientists manage to get so far? Why is that we in Mexico or Argentina or Latin America haven’t developed that? How did they have the will to solve this situation?” Damien Cave