Rust Publishing is an independent publishing collective formed by an emerging generation of photographers working between Poland and Eastern Germany. Treating visual storytelling as an autonomous language, the collective views photography as a tool for continual negotiation of meaning within a shifting post-modern society. Through twelve publications to date, Rust has established itself as a platform for emerging artists, amplifying individual voices and cultivating an environment in which the book embodies relationships that unfold over time. With self-publishing providing an independent framework of production, the group emphasises the development of work on its own terms in time, scale, and form. In this context, the photobook is understood as a site of resistance to digital impermanence, where images are shaped through the material processes of print and binding as much as through authorship.

Jakub Szachnowski is a visual artist and the founder of RUST Publishing. His interdisciplinary practice spans photography, video, installation, documentary film, mapping, and scenography. In The Hawk, Szachnowski departs from conventional documentary to construct a poetic, experiential study of place, developed during an immersive residency in a rural Slovakian school where falconry forms part of the curriculum. The project unfolds as a topographic and perceptual inquiry, exploring human engagement with the environment and shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Daria Izworska is a visual artist based between Kraków and Bristol. Her practice explores disability, psychological control, and relationality through mixed visual media and embodied methods. Drawing from personal history, her project God’s Children examines the lasting impact of growing up within a radical religious community. Working with family archives, staged re-enactments, and photographed artefacts, Izworska revisits structures of fear and indoctrination, revealing the weight of psychological conditioning. Unfolding over time, the work documents a shifting negotiation of personal agency in relation to the relentless presence of the All-Seeing.

Dominik Wojciechowski is a photographer and bookbinder whose practice bridges image-making and material production. His photographic work investigates identity and the relationship between individuals and space within varied social contexts. His project Svijet examines Yugonostalgia and post-Yugoslav identity as oppositional, ongoing conditions, exploring how the legacies of socialist Yugoslavia continue to shape the collective imagination. The work captures both the lingering presence of shared history and the tensions of living in newly formed national contexts, revealing how nationalisms and social change converge to form layered subjectivities across the former Yugoslav region.