When I connected with photographer Vlad Tretiak, I was reminded of that tiny, surreal feeling from the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. That small fish in a big pond thing.

Vlad grew up in the industrial city of Kemerovo, West Siberia. On Google Maps, it sits like a lonely pinpoint amid the mega-expanse of Russia’s landmass. Immediately, I assume growing up somewhere so far-flung must have been worlds apart from my own upbringing in Sydney, Australia.

“I was an average nerdy kid, my main interests were video games and skateboarding”, Vlad tells me. A man after my own heart, it turns out.

Cameras entered Vlad’s life in the mid-2000s, when his father arrived home with the family’s maiden digital camera – a Pentax Optio. Vlad became obsessed, spending days experimenting with settings and modes, recording videos under his parents’ watchful eye, bracing themselves each time he fiddled with it, hoping he hadn’t somehow broken it. Like any new technology of that era, be it a cellphone or PC, the camera carried an irresistible intrigue.

Vlad is visually archiving this very thought.

The buried lore of the places he documents is powerful. Your mind runs wild imagining what the walls of these structures have witnessed through years of prosperity and the decay that followed. I feel this hits especially hard for someone like myself who, more often than not, exists within the rhythm of major cities.

While we’ll never get to the bottom of most of these, Vlad can shed some light on a photo that stands as a stylistic outlier within his archive.

Wedged into a car are Vlad and his friends on an overnight drive to a huge electronic music festival. At one point on the drive, they veer off into backroads and lose all cellphone and FM radio signals. As they plunge deeper into a web of forestry roads, not even sure they’re driving the right way, their radio springs back to life, beaming in strange AM stations.

When questioned about the stillness and solitude running through his pictures, Vlad describes it as an extension of himself. “That’s almost how I see myself. I strive to be calm in life, stoic, like a rock. Everything is based around structure.”

Having spent the last six months living in New York myself, wide-open spaces like these seem as though they could only exist on another planet. Vlad’s answer to what it feels like out there genuinely surprised me.

From a gear standpoint, all it takes is two cameras. A Bronica GS-1 medium format, interchangeable in 6×6 and 6×7 formats, plus a Ricoh GR1s 35mm point and shoot. Loaded in both is more often not Kodak Portra (on all speeds). A stock that Vlad is familiar with and trusts for its results. On most occasions, his dials are set to long exposure and closed aperture up to f/8 or f/11.

For someone documenting stillness and relics of eras past, Vlad doesn’t strike me as nostalgic in an obvious way. But there is resistance running through his work. “I’m not fond of how our world is becoming more plastic, single-use and artificial,” he tells me. “I’d like to capture a glimpse of that ‘they don’t make them as they used to’ feeling.” I feel he intends to preserve pieces of a world that feel built to last – places marked by age, history and human presence. In Vlad’s hands, remote pockets of Russia become reminders that in a world of packaged goods, not everything meaningful needs to be brand spanking new.