Control Refresh gathers three years of work by Toma Gerzha, a photographer who holds a Russian passport and grew up in Amsterdam, in a household where Soviet habits and traditions remained close at hand. That double vantage point shapes the book. Gerzha travelled to Russian cities, including remote ones, and photographed her own generation: young people laughing, resting, dreaming, presenting themselves, going about ordinary days while military propaganda surrounds them. The result is neither reportage from the front nor a survey of politics, but a patient account of how daily life continues inside a climate of fear, where speaking against the war carries risk and conscription hangs over the future.

The photographs are accompanied by captions and a timeline of recent Russian events, a structure that gives the images context without turning them into illustrations. Gerzha also writes, and her text moves between her family’s emigration in 2009 and the digital world her peers inhabit. Her argument, lightly worn, concerns generation: the first cohort raised entirely online, whose habits of receiving experience secondhand invite comparison with the Silent Generation, however different the technology. Whether or not one accepts the parallel, it directs the book toward solitude and the substitution of mediated experience for lived contact.

Sophie Macleod edited the text; Rob van Hoesel designed the volume; lithography was by Marc Gijzen and production by Wilco Art Books. The book is large-format at 230 by 320 mm, 160 pages, softcover with a dust jacket, in English. Its first edition numbered 1,200 copies. For collectors drawn to photography that treats adolescence and authoritarian pressure as intertwined subjects, the combination of sequencing, annotation and a strong design hand should reward sustained looking.