Frank Herfort, a German photographer, has been working on a series of pictures he calls “Russian fairytales” for the past 15 years. He grew up in Leipzig and spent his childhood under communism, then his teens, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, under capitalism; he was fascinated to see familiar streetscapes colonised by advertising hoardings. His career has reflected that dichotomy. He has worked as a commercial photographer to fund an enduring fascination with the post-Soviet atmospheres of the east. When fellow art students relocated to London or Berlin after graduating, he settled in Moscow and began making photographs of the city’s interiors, taking his Hasselblad camera into waiting rooms and tiled hotel lobbies and curious bars, alive to juxtaposition and surreal comedy.

This picture was taken in the meadows on the banks of the River Moscow, on the fringe of the 850th anniversary park. The contrast in scale and tone between the picnicking mother and her toddler and the vast, foreboding architecture of the electricity pylons is typical of Herfort’s work. He is drawn to scenes in which people innocently inhabit places slightly beyond their understanding, as if they have been dropped there from a different time and place altogether.

There is something about what he calls the “chaos and the lightness and good-naturedness of ordinary Russians” that he tries to frame in different ways. The contrasts between the pictures he takes are as important as the contrasts within them. “I was always interested in shooting single photographs,” he says, “which show worlds and stories in one image.” He finds the classical reportage style, where you photograph 30 images of a story in series, too repetitive. “I think you can skip the before, after and in between. This is for me photography, the art of using just one frame.”

Russian Fairytales by Frank Herfort will be published by Kerber Verlag (£36) later this spring