The country has embraced capitalism and flung its door wide open to all the luxuries money can buy. Yet dark forces remain, and democracy is dead. This series looks at the winners and losers of Russia’s resurgence and asks why people are willing to support Putinism, exchange freedom for wealth, and participate in modern empire-building.

Moscow sees the Arctic as strategic, targeting massive investment. It sent a submarine to plant a titanium flag on the seabed under the North Pole, symbolically claiming its energy deposits to bully gas-hungry European countries.

At the same time, the North is dying. The present communities were created by Stalin, who sent prisoners all over USSR to the northern gulags to mine the resources. When Stalin died, the prisoners were freed but many stayed on to work at the pits and factories. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia no longer supported these remote Arctic settlements, and many of the gulag descendents now languish in poverty as factories, schools and hospitals close.

My work focuses on the Arctic people, their aspirations, their love and their survival in a landscape of bleak, haunting beauty.

The machines they use — to create the vintage look — send into the air lung-clogging blue dust. For each pair of jeans they scrub, workers earn one euro cent. In an adjacent part of town, their boss sits among fellow factory owners in a street restaurant, ready for another toast: “To the millionaires of Zhongshan!”

Today, most people do not wear jeans for hard physical work, but they still want to affect an air of ruggedness. This wear-and-tear process is outsourced to countries such as China, where cheap wages and lax environmental control allowed the rapid growth of a labour-intensive industry drenched in toxic chemicals.

An portrait series of famous and lesser-known Russians.

So they saddle up and take an incredible journey with their five-year-old Rowan across the Mongolian grassland on a quest for a miracle cure.