PhotoBooks Russia

On December 25, 1991, at 7:35 p.m., soldiers lowered the red Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin and raised the Russian tri-color in its place. The moment passed without pomp or circumstance, resulting in a strangely muted end to a regime that had, in many ways, defined the 20th century. Christmas 2001 is the tenth anniversary of the demise of the Soviet Union. To commemorate the event, National Geographic presents a mesmerizing retrospective that captures all the turbulence of Russia’s new beginning.

With 120 extraordinary photographs by Gerd Ludwig and incisive essays by Fen Montaigne, Broken Empire captures Russia in all its complexity. The book examines not only the fledgling country’s notorious corruption and poverty—the only aspects of Russia covered by most Western media—but many lesser known facets, including the rise of a new urban generation committed to building a prosperous society. Taking us into the daily lives of Russians, from entrepreneurs to pensioners, Broken Empire’s images and words come together to capture as no book ever has the poignant resilience of a country endeavoring to find a workable middle road between capitalism and state control.

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This unparalleled collection of photographs documents the years surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through the camera lens Shepard Sherbell tells a story that language alone cannot. He captures in more than 200 black-and-white images the previously unseen reality of everyday life in the fifteen former Soviet republics. In these photographs--sometimes humorous, amazing, or troubling, always enthralling--Sherbell offers an unprecedented view of people caught in the crucial moment of transition between communism and capitalism, repression and freedom, security and anarchy. On assignment for the German weekly Der Spiegel, Sherbell traveled throughout the dismantled Soviet Union from 1990 to 1993 with more freedom than a citizen could have achieved. Unrestricted in his access to subject matter, he recorded the faces and lives of those who inhabit what was once a superpower. Mothers, mine workers, prisoners, farmers, housewives, children--Sherbell shows us without sentimentality how life looked for a people whose awe-inspiring capacity to survive has been--and continues to be--tested. Serge Schmemann provides a general retrospective and moving introduction to the book.

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As St. Petersburg prepares to celebrate its 300th anniversary in May 2003, this fully illustrated volume reveals the essence of Russia's most beautiful city through new photographs and a unique collaboration between Russian and non-Russian writers. The city's architectural splendor and present day life is superbly captured by Yury Molodkovets, official photographer of the State Hermitage Museum. Contributions by eight leading writers on Russian history and society, including acclaimed historian Orlando Figes and Russia's most famous poet, Alexander Kushner, offer new insights into the city's past and present. This is a superb portrait of one of the world's most beautiful cities.

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A brilliant portrayal of Russians in the post-Soviet era--from ordinary people to politicians and rock stars. Heidi Hollinger, in a photographic tour-de-force, has captured the spirit of the Russian people as they adjust to their new freedoms. Her sympathetic portraits reveal how some "emerging" Russians relish their new opportunities while others, rooted in the past, struggle to survive in their changing world. The wide- ranging collection in this sumptuous volume includes images of workers, entertainers, artists, military officers, religious leaders, cosmonauts, Stalin's great-grandson, and Lenin's niece, among others. Accompanying the portraits is a fascinating text by Jonathan Sanders, who provides insight about the people of modern Russia and Hollinger's importance in documenting them during this intriguing, troubled era.

For nearly a decade, Hollinger has lived in Russia, at first as a visitor and gradually as an insider, gaining access to such high-profile politicians as Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin, as well as other top-echelon personalities. At the same time she explored Moscow's lower depths: mounted on in-line skates and armed with mace, she invited typical Russians to her studio to pose for a portrait. Her "working folk" images are in the tradition of pre- Revolutionary masters, who also wandered through the streets in search of representative faces to photograph. 175 photographs, 140 in full color. 9 1/2 x 13 3/8" trim size. Published 2002.

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While in Moscow in 1995, Günther Förg shot images of 50 examples of modernist architecture, including Melnikov's studio, famous and oft copied for its ground plan based on a drum, and numerous constructivist and avantgardist structures from the 20s and early 30s. Selected from 1,000 like photographs, from which Förg is currently assembling and printing his definitive Moscow archive. Signed and numbered in an edition of 1,000 copies.

Essay by Heinrich Klotz. Hardcover, 9.44 x 11.81 in., 288 pages, 50 color illustrations

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City portraits were a favorite theme of avant-garde photographers. The booming industrial metropolises, whose faces were to change radically within a few years, called for a new vision and unaccustomed perspectives. This is revealed in The New Moscow, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s view of the capital of the then still young Soviet Union, whose dynamic awakening during the Socialist era inspired the avant-garde artist to create this unusual project. After being expelled from the October group in 1932, Rodchenko was commissioned to take pictures of Moscow. Out of this series Varvara Stepanova, his wife and colleague, compiled a narrative sequence of eight-nine gelatin silver prints adding to it some photographs from the October period. The photos of street parades, housing projects, technical buildings, new sport facilities, and factories taken between the late twenties and early thirties were meant to appeal on two levels: firstly for their new aesthetics—the famous Rodchenko perspective and secondly for their film-like sequencing. The artist prepared the series for a 1933 edition, which was never published. Many of his high quality vintage prints were preserved, however, and are now published in a complete reconstruction of The New Moscow.

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It’s official. The gulags of Siberia are no more. Solzhenitsin’s nightmare of the absurd does not exist. The prisons are still there, of course, with plenty of customers, probably more than a million, such as the 15-year-old boy serving three and a half years for stealing two hamsters from a Moscow pet shop, or the mother of four who stole 12 cabbages – what can have possessed her? – and was rewarded with four years in Siberia.

So the inhuman lunacy still exists, but it is now officially apolitical. In reality it is an economic social endeavour. It does not pay to be a poor thief in Russia, since you will not have the resources to avoid the interminable train ride to the East when you are caught. Carl De Keyzer took that journey to photograph the prisons today. With two army colonels as his shadows, one to the left and one to the right, he photographed what he was allowed to see, and no more. But he has revealed a kind of winter wonderland, a Disneyland where all normal credibility is suspended – look, for example, at the tattoos in the photographs. "Where do they come from?" he asked. The answer came: "What tattoos? There are no tattoos. They are illegal." So they don’t exist. Your eyes decieve you. It has been said that the collective memory is black and white. In Zona, De Keyzer has elaborated on the brocaded fantasy of the Siberian prisons by using brilliant colour, as if from a hallucinatory dream. Look at the faces, and then the eyes, of the prisoners. There is a Zen despair there, as if they were wearing lederhosen in a remarkable holiday camp. They tell a disturbing story.

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This unparalleled collection of photographs documents the years surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through the camera lens Shepard Sherbell tells a story that language alone cannot. He captures in more than 200 black-and-white images the previously unseen reality of everyday life in the fifteen former Soviet republics. In these photographs--sometimes humorous, amazing, or troubling, always enthralling--Sherbell offers an unprecedented view of people caught in the crucial moment of transition between communism and capitalism, repression and freedom, security and anarchy. On assignment for the German weekly Der Spiegel, Sherbell traveled throughout the dismantled Soviet Union from 1990 to 1993 with more freedom than a citizen could have achieved. Unrestricted in his access to subject matter, he recorded the faces and lives of those who inhabit what was once a superpower. Mothers, mine workers, prisoners, farmers, housewives, children--Sherbell shows us without sentimentality how life looked for a people whose awe-inspiring capacity to survive has been--and continues to be--tested. Serge Schmemann provides a general retrospective and moving introduction to the book.

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UK, Canada, France, Germany or Japan