Pictures taken in the waning days of Soviet civilisation, when Bakharev and his subjects were involved in the semi-legal business of private portrait photography. That activity brought them together on the margins of society and created an almost erotic sense of trust among accomplices in an illegal form of micro-communism. As in amateur photography, what is essential is that the photographs were never meant to be seen by strangers: only their subjects were supposed to see them, and every shot was meant to exist as a single print, an original in the literal sense.