Aleksey Kondratyev made the photographs in *Ice Fishers* on the frozen Ishim River, which runs through Astana, the Kazakh capital built almost from scratch in the 1990s as the country’s oil reserves came into play. The city was intended as an emblem of post-Soviet modernity and an entry into the global economy. On the ice, where temperatures often reach forty degrees below zero, fishermen wait for fish beneath the surface, protecting themselves with salvaged pieces of plastic patched together from discarded packaging and rice bags found outside markets selling Western, Chinese and Russian goods.

Kondratyev photographs this improvised shelter, and through it the movement of imported material into a local, nomadic practice, revealing the point at which international trade policy meets individual lives. Published by Loose Joints in September 2018, the book holds forty colour plates across sixty pages, at 240 by 300 mm. It is a singer-sewn softcover with alternating papers and an insert.

Kondratyev was born in Bishkek in 1993 and received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit; he is a current MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome; Les Rencontres d’Arles; the Benaki Museum in Athens; and the Galleria Foto-Forum in Bolzano. It has been published in the Financial Times, CNN, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, Vogue, and National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles.