“No sentimentalty
towards the Motherland.
Absolutely none.
All what is left from the Motherland –
no official ideology, no patriotism,
just the sandy, dirty, dry, unfriendly, unfruitful soil.”

As children we used to play a game called “Secrets”. To hide something, to bury it under the ground: a flower, a leaf, a wrapper of a sweet under a glass. And it would become a secret, something important and wonderful.

The earth means connection to the land, your only visible image of the Motherland. In 2009 I left Russia, and since then I look for this image. To tell you a story of my native land, I came back to my archives. Hundreds of thousands of images, seven years of photographic life, the incredibly personal stories formed together this book.

This book is a symbol of an endless country, a story of a person of “the lost generation” - between the ruined Soviet Union, chaos of the nineteens and development of a new authoritarian unit.
Sometimes this book makes you laugh, sometimes it makes you cry. You feel at the same time the unbearable pain and highest joy. It is this combination of the complicated, the uncontrollable and the absurd, which we call “the mysterious Russian soul”.

The second version of the photo book "If You Have a Secret" by Irina Popova, published in August 2017 by Dostoevsky Publishing (Amsterdam)

The second version has a different design, double-folded "secret" pages, and other features. The photos are only 75% the same with previous edition, and the texts are re-vised and re-edited.

Edition of 400 English + 100 Russian copies, all numbered and signed.

Size - 23 x 29 cm
128 photo pages + 64 text pages.