Miguel Proença’s The Buzzer takes as its subject the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and the unresolved antagonisms between Russia and the West that continue to shape them. Published by Eriskay Connection in 2025, the book draws on a long-term photographic project set largely in these former Soviet territories, now members of the EU and NATO. Proença photographs military exercises, national celebrations, and ordinary encounters, while also attending to the parallel worlds of conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda, and the echo chambers that condition public perception.
What distinguishes the project is its layering. Proença combines his own photographs with archival material, much of it from the Estonian National Archives, so that statues raised and toppled, borders drawn and erased, and medieval references such as the Battle on the Ice sit beside present-day NATO operations. Threaded through the sequence are transcripts of UVB-76, the shortwave signal of presumed Russian military origin from which the book takes its title. The transcripts work less as explanation than as a recurring disturbance—an unresolved tone running beneath the images.
The design, by Carel Fransen, holds this material in a Swiss-bound softcover of 144 pages, published in English and Portuguese at 226 × 295 mm. Proença does not separate past from present, or fact from fiction, into tidy sections. Instead he lets them accumulate, allowing the book’s argument to emerge through juxtaposition and sequence. Identity here is neither fixed nor safely resolved; it is something contested, administered, and remade across a landscape marked by occupation, surveillance, and resilience.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this method rather than in claims of rarity or critical triumph. It is a first edition from a publisher known for attentive bookmaking, and it belongs to a growing body of photographic work examining the post-Soviet condition. Its companion vinyl release, with soundscapes by Pedro Augusto composed from original UVB-76 recordings, extends the project beyond the page—an unusual but coherent gesture for a book whose central motif is a signal that never stops transmitting.
