Collage offered Titarenko a way to make art that might be obliquely critical but still approved by censors. He began incorporating tissue paper and images torn from magazines and newspapers into his photographs, and photographing the results. In the mid-’80s, after studying photography in school and fulfilling his military service, he was still interested in the idea of collage, and he began sandwiching together his negatives so that photographs of public statues often ended up superimposed onto the text printed on street signs. “I loved this project. But at my happiest time at work on the series, the Soviet Union collapsed,” he says ruefully. “It’s like for people who worked all their life to fight the Franco regime in Spain, and then Franco just died. All these artists became obsolete. Nothing to fight.”