Outside in: 25 foreign photographers shooting the post-Soviet world
For all that Russia is a part of the world under perennial international scrutiny, it's still hard to come across photography that offers a fresh and complex view of the country and its post-Soviet neighbours. From exhilarating architectural imagery to intimate portraits of people and places, here's the work of 25 international photographers providing a uniquely insightful take on the region today.
25 November 2014
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Rafal Milach
Polish photographer Rafal Milach is a member of Sputnik Photos, a collective that documents transition in post-Soviet territories. His lauded book 7 Rooms is a striking study of winter in Siberia, of endless landscapes juxtaposed with the intimacy of warmly-lit rooms.
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Rob Hornstra
Rob Hornstra’s ambitious Sochi Project, created in collaboration with writer Arnold van Bruggen, is an in-depth study of the Russian South prior to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Honstra’s lens reveals the region’s many layers: the Russian holidaymakers on their annual trip to the sea, the decaying beauty of the sanatoriums, the troubled Caucasus and the many lives affected by the Olympics.
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Simon Roberts
From 2004 to 2005 Simon Roberts travelled across Russia, photographing over 200 places. A decade on, his extensive collection of images, which capture a range of landscapes and characters, maintains an impressive immediacy.
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Richard Pare
Richard Pare has had a distinguished career as a photographer of architecture. His passion for Russian avant-garde buildings began in 1993 when he saw a photograph of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. For the past 20 years he has travelled widely in the former Soviet Union recording the glory and the tragedy of Constructivism's legacy and acting, increasingly, as an outspoken advocate for the preservation of these buildings.
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Davide Monteleone
Davide Monteleone lives between Rome and Moscow and has published several books on Russia, including Dusha, Russian Soul (2007). From the cold seas of Northern Odyssey to tracing the frontiers of the former Iron Curtain in The Unexisting Line and making a black and white study of contemporary Chechnya, his work remains consistently subtle and arresting.
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Nadav Kander
Born in Israel and based in London, Nadav Kander is a highly regarded portrait and landscape photographer whose work has been exhibited at spaces including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A. His series of large-format images in Dust (also available as a book published by Hatje Cantz) conveys the austere landscapes of Soviet nuclear test sites along with their silent relics, all captured in an eerie ash-grey light.
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Claudine Doury
French photographer Claudine Doury has been travelling to Russia and Eastern Europe for more than a decade; her black-and-white monograph on Siberia, Peuples de Sibérie, was published in 1999. Doury’s dream-like images of young boys and girls coming of age in a post-Soviet youth camp or of the vast landscapes of Kyrgyzstan are breathtakingly cinematic, capturing the fragile beauty of her subjects.
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Christopher Herwig
Christopher Herwig has photographed all over the world, but post-Soviet territories have proved an enduring interest. He has captured the diversity of landscapes and lifestyles along the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia. He also has devoted the past 12 years of his life to travelling 30,000 km by car, bike, bus and taxi across 13 countries in pursuit of his one obsession: Soviet-era bus stops. With their distinctive architectural styles, from geometric and Brutalist to rococo and temple-like, each bus stop is a small expression of a thwarted utopian dream.
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Andy Freeberg
In his series Guardians, American photographer Andy Freeberg pays homage to one of the defining characteristics of Russian museums: middle-aged female guards. The series plays with the complementary colours and shapes between guards and painting, ensuring the women, customarily pushed to the periphery, are an essential part each image.
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Carl de Keyzer
Born in Belgium, Carl de Keyzer has been teaching photography and shooting all over the world since 1982. Russia, he claims, has been his favourite place to photograph for years. His most notable projects include his study of Soviet society Homo Sovieticus (1989) and Zona (2003), an unexpectedly colourful snapshot of life in prison camps.
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Ville Lenkkeri
In his book The Place of No Roads, Finnish photographer Ville Lenkkeri explores Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean once home to a Soviet mining community who lived rent-free and with free food. Since the collapse of communism the coal-mining town has been largely abandoned. Lenkkeri captures perfectly the silence of the now-defunct municipal buildings, the serenity of the surrounding mountains and the dream-like isolation of the remaining few who still live there.
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Frederic Chaubin
French photographer Frederic Chaubin produced a fascinating study of Soviet architeture across fourteen former Soviet Republics — focussing on the unexpected rebirth of imagination which took place between the 1970s and 1990s. His book Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed published by Taschen celebrates out-of-this-world architectural masterpieces which otherwise would have been forgotten.
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Leo Erken
Dutch photographer Leo Erken combines the sharpness of a photojournalist with an interest in the personal. From 1987 to 2003 he documented Eastern Europe and Russia in the transitional period after the fall of the Iron Curtain, with the results published as the book Улица Street Straße.
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Sohei Yasui
Japanese photographer Sohei Yasui moved from Tokyo to Kazan in the Russian republic of Tatarstan in 2008. His work meticulously explores his surroundings and his portraits are imbued with the depth and breadth of human emotion. His photographic series reveal his range as a photographer: The River is subtle and meditative, Tabor, about Russian gypsies, is festive, while Kryashens, which follows an ethnic Tatar group, has an overarching tone of melancholy.
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Donald Weber
Canadian photographer Donald Weber moved into photography from architecture, having previously worked at Rem Koolhaas’ practice OMA in Rotterdam. In his series Drunken Bride, Weber explores the darker side of Russia: the deep forests of Siberia which are home to prison camps, the sorrow present in snowy graveyards and the marginal and disaffected in Russian contemporary society.
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Eric Lusito
Eric Lusito uses photography as both an aesthetic and an archaeological tool, revealing the unravelling of Soviet military power across the former Soviet Union. Lusito travelled from East Germany to Mongolia, visiting abandoned military bases documenting “the symbols of the all-powerful Soviet Empire, once seemingly inviolable”.
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Simon Crofts
Originally from Edinburgh, Simon Crofts moved to Russia to work as a lawyer for seven years during the 1990s when the country was making its transition to capitalism. In addition to magazine editorials, Crofts produced The Land of Expectations, a series of photo stories and essays on Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that seek to develop a better understanding of the region.
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Gulliver Theis
Gulliver Theis’ travel photography captures Russia perfectly: the Brutalist architecture of Kaliningrad, St Petersburg’s magical white nights and the edgy, exotic charm of Dagestan.
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Jacob Aue Sobol
Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol’s high-contrast, black-and-white images are imbued with a sobering quality, not least because of his preference for close-ups. His series Arrivals and Departures is the result of 28 days spent on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Ulan Bator to Beijing. During the trip, he took around 1,000 photos a day, later edited down to a striking series of portraits.
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Rachel Papo
In her series Desperately Perfect, New York-based photographer Rachel Papo captures one of Russia’s legendary ballet schools, the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St Petersburg, through the eyes of its young stars: their determination, dreams, and desperate desire for perfection.
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Ikuru Kuwajima
Kazan-based Japanese photographer Ikuru Kuwajima is drawn to hidden elements in landscape and society: from an invisible settlement in an abandoned military barracks near Priozersk in Kazakhstan to a closed community of Cossacks, to the beauty of the mountains on the Tajik-Afghan border.
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Pascal Dumont
From portraits of students living in dormitories in the capital to scenes of the faithful cleansing themselves in icy water for the feast of Epiphany, Moscow-based Canadian photojournalist Pascal Dumont has mastered the art of capturing Russia’s curious customs and habits.
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MAP6
MAP6 is a collective of six photographers — Mitch Karunaratne, Chloe Lelliott, Heather Shuker, David Sterry, Paul Walsh and Laurie Griffiths — who together document contemporary Moscow. Each photographer has a different take on themes that range from history to geography to society: the interior details of an off-limits Space Centre, the anonymous faces of workers in underground kiosks or the modernist structures that tower over the city, dwarfing the passers-by below.
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Will Webster
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The Moscow Project
In The Moscow Project Alessandro Albert and Paolo Verzone have produced a fascinating report on the changing face of the post-Soviet city. The pair visited the capital three times, in 1991, 2001 and 2011, taking more than a hundred portraits on each occasion. In the process, they captured different social groups, professions and ages along with the unique atmosphere of each decade.
