There’s a joke Russians tell: “The city is great, it’s just that this neighborhood is bad.” The aim for this work is start a conversation about why this is funny. One way of talking about it is with pictures; Misha Friendman thinks of Photo 51, the breakthrough X-ray diffraction image shot in 1952 that provided researchers with a way to model the structure of DNA. He wants to employ this power and begin to identify corruption’s warping effect on Russian society’s DNA.

For more information on Misha Friedman’s work, please visit his website here.