Vasil Stanko stages tableaux with groups of people in abandoned theatres and creates a complex vision of depth by lining up the foreground and background. His images often look like elaborate frozen dance pieces with one gesture or form repeated several times. He is concerned with the psychology of people in groups, whether we are acting together in peaceful unity or collapsing into a mob, like "the meeting of the poor in Paris." His book, "How to Take Care About the Natives" is an important moment in the history of staged photography as it is the meeting of this kind of work with explicitly political subject matter. Each image is an illustration from a point in a pamphlet given to Russian soldiers explaining how to break up the culture of the country you are occupying. Stanko makes the instructions visual with a mixture of humor and pathos. He has also done a series of disembodied heads and recently a very complex group called "a theatre in mirrors." Website