Lyalya Kuznetsova was born in 1946 in Uralsk and trained as an aviation engineer before taking up photography in the late 1970s, becoming a member of the legendary TASMA photography group. From the mid-1980s her work has been shown across Europe and the United States, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and published in the United States, Germany and Britain. The Road is her first book published in Russia, bringing together the fullest account yet of her work from recent decades. In his preface, Alexander Lapin writes that to understand Kuznetsova's photographs you need to have watched her take them - bending her knees, bracing against the ground, a moment of triumph and command in which she becomes, briefly, the creator of the world that will later emerge from the black-grey-white depths of the film.