In Alekhovshchina, a small village in rural Russia, four families are bound to one another by proximity, habit, and the ordinary events that mark a life: birthdays, funerals, cups of tea poured for a visitor. Nadia Sablin photographed there across more than a decade, returning often enough that the children she first met grew up before her lens and the grandmothers she listened to grew old. Years Like Water sets out what those returns accumulated — a portrait of a place that resists the shorthand so often applied to it from outside.

The book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2023, gathers 69 colour photographs across 128 pages, loosely following the interconnected households as children roam a wilderness that feels enchanted and adults negotiate an economy that does not reward them. Sablin’s method is patient and social rather than extractive: she attended the rites of passage, sat with the elderly, and recorded stories of loneliness and mutual affection as they were told to her. Beauty, poverty, trauma, and hope are interleaved rather than resolved into argument.

What distinguishes the work is its refusal of the ready narrative — the “Putin’s Russia” that both Eastern and Western media tend to reach for — in favour of a world more complicated than that frame allows. The sequence carries the weight of elapsed time; the title is not decoration but a statement of method. Sablin, born in Russia in 1980, has built a practice around intimate, long-duration narrative in rural Russia and Ukraine, and this is among its fullest expressions.

At 23 by 25.5 centimetres in hardback, the volume gives the colour plates room to breathe. For collectors of contemporary documentary photography, Years Like Water is worth attention as a sustained, decade-long engagement with a single community — a body of work about how people absorb the passage of time under unstable economic conditions, made by a photographer whose commitment to the place is legible on every page.