In recent decades, fake facades concealing construction work or the dilapidated state of buildings have become a familiar part of the everyday urban landscape in major Russian cities. Architectural imagery, gaining volume and spatial presence, has come to function as a legitimate architectural form in its own right. 

What lies behind the printed facade remains unknown: a listed building awaiting restoration; a derelict house hidden from public view; or simply emptiness. The fake facade is anonymous, ahistorical. Its connection to the original is purely formal, while the image itself is always a simplified and distorted version. It becomes a sign that both conceals and points to the absence of the original. 

In the post-truth era, fake façades have come to symbolize concealment and deception — not only in architecture but in broader social and cultural contexts. 

In the post-2022 political climate, the fake façade in Russia has shifted from an architectural metaphor to a psychological image — one of distancing, of choosing not to see what is happening. The illusion becomes a convenient form of survival, a voluntary veil over rupture or devastation. 

In the photographs, I seek to emphasize this contradiction between the idealized surface and the concealed uncertainty. I use digital retouching to make the cityscape resemble architectural models — untouched, impossible, depersonalized.

My photographic method is intentionally hybrid. I combine analog photography with digital post-production, creating a visual language that blurs the line between documentary and constructed reality. The slight artificiality introduced in the editing process acts as a visual echo of the deception embedded in the façades themselves. 

What emerges is a study of the aesthetics of concealment. The city becomes both a stage and a symptom — a territory where illusion replaces truth, and the banner becomes the architecture of forgetting.