“The Black Rat Has Died” is a raw, bittersweet, and at times darkly ironic book about life, death, and family. Misha Bushkov interweaves intimate scenes of his wife’s pregnancy in Switzerland with pictures of his extended family 3,000 kilometers away in Russia. These images — made before the invasion of Ukraine — capture a world Bushkov now feels has irrevocably changed. Through cinematic sequencing and two deeply personal letters written after the birth of his son, Bushkov fuses tenderness, absurdity, and contradiction, capturing the dissonance of what it means to be a family across distance, borders, and time.

“All the photographs in this book were taken by me between 2011 and 2022 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Zurich, Switzerland. I stopped photographing in Rostov after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as I stopped visiting. The Russia in these images is a pre-war Russia. The fucked-up shit that surfaced after 2022 changed everything irrevocably.”
- Misha Bushkov