“Memory is a choice,” writes Ocean Vuong in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—his debut novel that flickers between confession and prayer, between autofiction and collective reckoning. At first glance, his emotional declaration feels empowering: the idea that we can actively curate our memories, decide what stays and what is allowed to fade into the blissful fog of forgetting cannot but appeal. But sadly the reality is different—no act of memory storage is actually voluntary. In its constant transformation, fluidity, and replacement, memory rather resembles a forest: porous, malleable, simultaneously growing and dying, reshaped not only by the flow of its own, internal, sap, but also by the flow of time. And by the axe of the woodcutter.
In recent decades, the forest has emerged as a significant symbolic site in contemporary photographic practices, particularly within the photobook medium. No longer confined to the role of passive backdrop, the forest increasingly functions as an active agent in visual narratives mediating between personal memory, cultural identity, and ecological consciousness. As examples, one can recall Michael Lange’s Wald, Maja Daniels’ Elf Dalia and my favorite Hubert Humka’s Eternal U—all in their own way planting, caring, and cultivating their own forest-based imagery.Across such works, the forest becomes a locus for addressing broader ontological and epistemic concerns, raising critical questions about visibility, temporality, spirituality, and the construction of meaning in post-natural environments.

Both as a reference to an actual forest and a metaphor, forest appears in Katya Selezneva in There Round the Corner in the Deep photobook— a long-term project that explores the legacy of silenced histories. Set against the fog-shrouded, myth-heavy backdrop of Sarov—Russia’s “nuclear Eden,” a closed town synonymous with state secrecy—the series features a bricolage of (hi)stories presented at various abstraction levels. It is simultaneously a staged documentation of the city’s artefacts, an intimate reflection on the photographer’s family archive, and a literal walk through the forest with the boundary between fact and fiction, as Selezneva herself admits, “becoming less and less visible”. The way she looks back and remembers her grandparents’ town resonates with the way some Russians might look and struggle to recognize their own country now, whose past, present and future are transformed into an absurd nonsensical farce where the violent borders on the religious, the sacred—on the overtly nationalistic, the past—on lushly futuristic.

And if forest is a memory, in Selezneva’s series it is scary, anonymous, and dark, riddled with caves, hollows, and dead ends. To walk through such a memory is to excavate the absence—to trace the contours of the forgotten. Illustrative in this regard is an image of the riza of Seraphim of Sarov’s icon that, in my opinion, plays if not central than one of the key roles in There Round the Corner in the Deep: with no depiction of the Saint himself under it, the metal casing traditionally used to protect and venerate relics reveals the empty black openings. What was once a sacred face had become a void.
This image lingered with me. The riza without the icon feels like a visual paradox: a presence that reveals an absence. It does not destroy the idea of sanctity but exposes its erosion. It becomes a metonym: a part standing in for something larger, but now missing, forgotten, or even kidnapped, hinting at the emptied gestures of a faith no longer felt. What remains instead is merely ornamental, decorative... and mute.
Since the rise of Vladimir Putin, Orthodoxy has been instrumentalized into a pillar of state ideology—its imagery, rituals, and moral authority folded into the machinery of aggressive nationalist propaganda. In this process, the church has largely ceased to be a witness to suffering or a shelter for the marginalized. Instead, it has become an agent of state power, blessing not peace but tanks, not reconciliation but conquest. The sacred has been weaponized. The words of the Gospels—about love, humility, and the sanctity of life—have been drowned out by public prayers for military victory over the imagined enemy and the silence of clergy in the face of atrocities.
Selezneva’s photograph of the riza without the icon thus takes on a chilling resonance. Reflecting on what it stands for in current historical conditions, I see it as a metonym for a spiritual and moral vacuum. In the dark emptiness where a saint’s face should be, we glimpse not only what has been forgotten, but what has been willfully abandoned: compassion, mercy, respect of the ultimate value of the human life, as well as the idea that the declared divine presence demands ethical responsibility.
Should remembering be an act of will, can one also choose to forget?

But Selezneva’s photobook is not about religion’s appropriation only. The other, not less important component, is the Soviet chapter of the town of Sarov—the time when the artist’s grandparents moved in with her grandfather she never knew working at KB-11, one of the leading development centers of weapons of mass destruction. The top secrecy associated with such places resonates with mystification of the religious: what was believed to be sacred for the Russians before the USSR was substituted with the faith into the scientific. Both are now replaced by Putin’s new ideology of violence, ignorance, and Russia’s unique “civilizing” mission. To adopt this openly fascist vision is to be lost in the macabre forest, where nothing is actually clear, sane, or predictable. A walk in such a forest is a walk through the timelessness, where the ghosts of one’s ancestors live side by side with the silence of their offspring.
Vuong’s phrase—“Memory is a choice”—takes on an unsettling clarity here. In authoritarian contexts, the choice isn’t always personal. It is made by institutions, regimes, media and official culture that disfigure reality. Russia’s official memory industry has long rehearsed this tactic: glossing over the subject of the Gulag, euphemizing repression, repackaging loss into pride. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the escalation into full-scale war in 2022, state mass media outlets intensified this “cherry-picked” remembering. The past became a dangerous arsenal—tamed, edited, weaponized.
In this context, Selezneva’s project is not only an act of remembering but of dissent. She doesn’t just recover family history—she recovers the very right to remember truthfully, even if, in case of her own family, voids are as frequent as actual stories. Her images invite viewers to look beyond the haze of either religious or nationalist myths and confront what remains. The project suggests that forgetting is rarely passive. Like Vuong, she implies that amnesia itself is an active force—one often imposed from above.
Memory then becomes not a passive archive but a verb—a choice to testify, to carry and to care, to resist.