Zheleznogorsk was built in the early 1950s as a closed military-scientific settlement in the heart of Siberia, laid out to an artistic masterplan and absent from every official map. After the Soviet Union dissolved, its residents voted to keep their distance from the outside world, choosing to remain closed. Ine Lamers’s The Radiant Screen takes this place and its stubborn isolation as its subject.

Lamers does not work as a lone observer. The book is assembled as what its publisher calls a mesh of evidence: photographs she made there, produced recordings, gathered documents, verbal descriptions and testimonies from collaborators, each participant reflecting a different aspect of the founding dream. Edited into sequence, these materials describe an aspirational socialist city and the contradictions that accumulate around it, leaving gaps and glitches rather than a sealed narrative.

Fw:Books issued the project in 2023 as a 152-page paperback in English, measuring 17 by 24 centimetres. That modest format suits a book built from fragments; the reader moves between archival matter, transcriptions of speech and pictures without being told how to reconcile them. The title’s radiant screen suggests both projection and concealment, and the design holds that ambiguity in place.

The result is valuable less as documentation of an inaccessible place than as a study of how a utopian idea is remembered, defended and narrated by the people who lived inside it. For collectors interested in photography that works with archives and testimony, and in the afterlives of the Soviet project, The Radiant Screen is a considered and deliberately unresolved addition to the shelf.