Shooting history: photographer Maria Gruzdeva’s 70,000km journey along the post-Soviet borderlands

Photographer Maria Gruzdeva has been living in London for a few years now and, increasingly, she's found her mind turning back to her native Russia. To settle the questions of history, identity and place that she's been turning over, Gruzdeva recently began to travel to Russia's borders, visiting the territories that seemed to her most emblematic of the country's tangled, problematic past and politics. "I've been working on the project for the past few years and it is still work in progress. It features images from various trips to the border territories and also to the North Pole and to Abkhazia," says Gruzdeva. "The story starts with a photograph of the city of Sovetsk, located in Kaliningrad, which is an exclave of Russia and also the country's most westerly point. The last photograph of the selection depicts Cape Astafieva, located at Nakhodka Bay in the very east of Russia. Overall in my trips so far I've covered a total of 69,710km distance."