Michal Chelbin’s Sailboats and Swans was published by Twin Palms Publishers in 2012. The hardback volume runs to 120 pages and contains 62 four-colour plates, measuring roughly 12 by 13 inches. An essay and interview by A. M. Homes accompany the photographs. The title belongs to a body of work made in Ukraine and Russia, where Chelbin photographed prisoners over a period of several years.

The publisher describes the pictures as constructed moments — “a scene within a scene, the real within the unreal” — and Homes characterises them as being about a kind of discomfort, shared between subject, photographer and viewer. Her essay frames Chelbin as someone who never blinks, always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. These are the terms the book itself offers for the work, and they set its tone.

The series takes its name from pastoral wallpapers that, with a certain cynicism, often cover the walls and surfaces of the settings depicted. The surroundings, the clothing and the pose all take part in the image, so that each portrait reads as a staged encounter rather than a documentary record. The result is a portrait project in which artifice and institutional reality press against one another.

The large format gives the plates room to breathe, and the sequence moves between individual sitters and the decorated interiors that frame them. Homes’s essay and interview provide a spoken counterpoint to the photographs, so that the book is experienced as a conversation between image, place and voice rather than as a simple gathering of portraits.