Inside the machine: scenes from a factory floor in Yekaterinburg

In 2013, photographer Sergey Poteryaev headed to two factories in his hometown of Yekaterinburg to document a generation of workers employed there since before the collapse of the USSR. “In Soviet times the majority of citizens spent most of their lives working in factories,” says Poteryaev. “To add a touch of warmth to their place of work, they would take in various personal effects, anything from a plant to a poster.” In this series of images, Poteryaev — whose work has been shown in exhibitions around the world — sets portraits of the factory personnel beside images of their possessions. The result is a deliberate reordering of scale that emphasises the human over the machine and intimacy over alienation on the factory floor.