“I’d say on average it’s one week of work for one Lenin,” says photographer Niels Ackermannn of the project, “Looking for Lenin.” Jointly produced with French journalist Sebastien Gobert, the series currently includes images of 70 different statues of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin that were toppled in Ukraine’s quest to rid the landscape of Soviet symbols.

That’s about 490 days that Ackermann and Gobert have dedicated to tracking down and photographing Lenin in places like storage units, dumpsters, car trunks, closets, fields, artist studios, and museums. Each image hides a unique story of the bureaucracy they hurdled and the estimated 6,000 miles traveled in Ukraine to discover what might turn out to be only Lenin’s beard, elbow, or nose. “It’s like