Once it was
… in process …
Once It Was is a photobook structured as a swatch book for a factory that no longer exists.
It investigates what time preserves and what it destroys: how what was built to last disappears, while the most fragile things endure: newspapers, cotton samples, faded portraits. The Avanguard textile factory, built before the revolution in northern Russia, was demolished in 2021 after more than a century of operation. The book assembles four material layers: photographs made inside the factory while it still stood in 2020 and at the demolition site in 2021; thirty issues of the factory newspaper from 1979; workers' portraits rephotographed from thos pages, foregrounding the female labor that official history overlooked; and cotton fabric samples from a neighboring factory, rephotographed and reconstructed to full scale using AI-prompted pattern extrapolation.
Color structures the book's narrative logic. It opens with ruins in black and white alongside vivid fabric patterns. As pages turn, color migrates — the fabrics fade to gray as the photographs of ruins slowly gain it. By the final pages, the ruins glow and the fabrics are monochrome.
A closing envelope contains documentation of a 2021 performative intervention: women workers' portraits, printed on semi-transparent fabric, placed on the fence surrounding the demolition site. People stopped. Some said they recognized faces.
I was thinking about time and its power on things and materials for a long time. The big surprise for me was to find a huge brick building as a ruin and to find an old catalog of fabrics from the mid-20th century alive and bright and vivid.
Exploring the factory in 2020, I found a stack of newspapers from 1979. I took them with me and scanned them. Most of the photographs inside were portraits of female workers. I re-photographed all of them. There are about fifty faces.
For the book, I re-photographed each fabric sample from the catalog and used AI to extrapolate the rapport of each textile reconstructing a full pattern from what survived only as a small swatch.