Alexander Gronsky’s Less Than One captures Russia’s most sparsely inhabited regions in wintry, unsettling quiet—where the landscape outlasts its people, and solitude becomes almost architectural.
These are not barren, apocalyptic scenes; rather, they are meticulously framed compositions where the human presence is a whisper—lingering traces, discarded wrappers, half-buried signs of life against a pale, unrelenting backdrop. Though Gronsky works within the idiom of landscape photography, his work resists the tradition’s romantic tropes. Here, the landscape is not sublime but suspended, somewhere between paralysis and latency.
Photographed in tandem with his earlier project The Edge, the series bears the cold imprint of Russian winter. The snow doesn’t blanket—it empties. With each frame, Gronsky seems to suggest a world paused indefinitely, where a colourful playground remains childless and ferry ports are stages for quiet departures. The scenes suggest both abandonment and anticipation, a tension between the Soviet-era past and an uncertain thaw into the future. His minimalist approach, dominated by washed-out hues and careful spatial geometry, reads as both anthropological and psychological.
Gronsky’s strength lies in his refusal to dramatize. Instead, he constructs a quiet visual rhythm—what he describes as akin to “thoughtless staring with a vague sense of unease.” It’s an affective stillness, where meaning is not prescribed but accumulates like frost on a windowpane.
