Overview

Russian Independent SelfPublished collective was founded in June 2015 by independent artists and book makers from Russia Natalia Baluta, Elena Kholkina and Alla Mirovskaya. Traditional art and cultural institutions in Russia, as well as traditional ways of publishing, were not helping artists and their work to find its way to the international audience. Therefore we took an initiative to build a new approach, where independence and collaboration between the artists help to unlock new opportunities and bring a broad expose. "RIS" We represents group of independent artists and book-makers from Russia who prefer freedom of self publishing: Natalia Baluta, Elena Kholkina, Alla Mirovskaya, Julia Borissova, Jana Romanova, Anastasia Bogomolova and others. We feel disconnection between global society and Russian-speaking photobook lovers. And we would like engage in more active collaboration to connects authors with broader audience. One of our priorities is to showcase photobooks from independent Russian artists at international art and photo book fairs. As independent publisher we were part of Vienna Photobook festival 2015, 2016, 2017; Unseen Amsterdam 205, 2016, 2017; Cosmos Arles books 2016, 2017; Offprint Paris 2015, Polycopies Paris 2015, 2016; Libros Mutantes Madrid, 2016, 2017; LA Art Book Fair 2017 and many other. Other important focus of our work is to popularize photobook medium for the Russian audience. We teach, organizing lectures, long term programs and workshops, curate the exhibitions and book competitions, do portfolio reviews for young photographers, enable new books publishing and contribute to the photobooks events all across Russia, in Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Uglich, etc.