Stalin was known, amongst other predominantly murderous things, as a proponent of the political use of photo doctoring. We know this from the haunting gaps in Bolshevik-era photos in which a political rival once stood.  The idea of being erased from history was executed with untold skill by the dictator, who not only ruthlessly dispatched his enemies from their mortal coil, but also eradicated them from the rolls of films that might have testified to their one-time involvement in political life.

Vladimir Putin has observed the leader’s fondness for celluloid, but in a somewhat different fashion. If in one hundred years time one was to unearth the Prime Minister’s photo album in the absence of any knowledge about him, you might imagine he had been a actor sliding with seamless versatility from one role to the next, whose characters were captured in a series of finely-tuned publicity shots.  A set of photographs which are all imbued with the rosy tone of of the propagandist lens and the knowledge of a captive audience.