Alexander Gronsky’s photograph of families in the snow hints at something more dubious

The photographer Alexander Gronsky calls the series of pictures he took in Moscow suburbs, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Something Is Going on Here. This image of families in the snow has a kind of dubious innocence. It is juxtaposed in other photos in the collection with military vehicles idling in these same winter landscapes at the edge of the city, and uniformed Russian soldiers mingling with ordinary residents. The contrast gives all of the images a disturbing edge of menace. You find yourself looking hard, for example, at the couple of figures on the right of this picture, in authoritarian black, and wondering how they fit with the people in the primary-coloured jackets. They are part of a landscape in which “normal life” is never quite what it seems.

Gronsky was born in Estonia, and has been based in Russia for most of his career – despite being arrested in the anti-Putin protests of 2015. He has long been drawn to the curious hinterlands at the edge of cities, places half-developed or awaiting development, bulldozers standing by, tower blocks not completed. In a recent interview he explained how he was drawn to these areas because those “edgelands” represented an uncertain kind of escape from the normal rules of cities that require you to walk on the pavement and behave yourself. “Suddenly,” he said, “there’s a gap in the fence, and beyond lies an abandoned construction site. Different rules apply in this space – there are no ethical boundaries; you can use this place as a restroom or smash beer bottles.” That kind of unwritten licence creates what Gronsky documents as a new kind of uneasy “pastoral” where norms become unruly, borders porous, and everywhere is a sort of no man’s land, where – good or bad – “anything can happen”.

Alexander Gronsky is at Galerie Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse, until 23 March