Max Sher, a Russian photographer, thinks of his deadpan photos of post-Soviet Russia as a kind of defiance against propagandized history. “Everyday life and everyday representation was almost impossible during Soviet rule,” Sher says. “Landscape photography could not even exist because it … looked not quite as optimistically as the government wanted it to look.” Sher's work is particularly timely in light of Russia's intervention in Ukraine, a blizzard of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies. Timothy Snyder, writing for the New York Review of Books, points out the resemblance between the Russian parliament’s justification for military action and the glorified Soviet history campaigns of yore. The March 1 vote that authorized force in Ukraine was premised on the need to restore “social and political normality,” he notes, a phrase suggesting a particular understanding of Russia’s rightful status in the former Soviet-bloc country. Speaking at a televised show on Thursday, Putin called eastern Ukraine “New Russia,” a term used to describe the area after it was conquered by the Russian Empire in the 1700s. It is this carefully managed version of history -- in which the “mere action of seeing for yourself was a kind of subversive action” -- that Sher has sought to push back against in his photos. He has chosen to identify the exact coordinates of the locations in order to draw attention to both the ordinariness of the landscape and the broad geographical scope of his project. The point, Sher says, is that these “buildings or landscapes can be found anywhere, everywhere." In other words, there's nothing particularly special about Russia after all. --Katelyn Fossett

Max Sher