Boris Savelev’s (Chernivtsi, Ukraine, 1947) eye was trained in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, as part of a group of photographers who worked independently, outside the official photographers’ union. When perestroika came about, dealers in the United States and Europe travelled to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the quest for ‘authentic voices’. Secret City: Photographs of the USSR by Boris Savelev (Thames and Hudson, 1988) was the outcome of this effort and became the first monograph in the West devoted to an unofficial photographer from the now-defunct USSR.

Now this exhibition is presented as a broader retrospective on Savelev up to today. It surveys the six decades in which he captured the everyday making—not only taking—photographs: from his beginnings in black and white with his Iskra 6×6 and his Leica, including his colour pictures in the 1980s with both Soviet Owarchrome and Western Kodachrome film, until his incorporation of digital technology, which he handles with the same mastery as analogue photography.

The artist places a great deal of importance on the relationship between the photograph taken and its physical representation. The extraordinary complexity and slight surface texture characterising many of his prints is the outcome of a unique method in which the image is printed in multiple layers over a gesso base, similar to what is used in traditional painting.