RUSSIA

Yelena Yemchuk – Odesa

Growing up in the capital city of Kyiv in the late 1970s, Yelena Yemchuk felt inexplicably drawn to Odesa, a city recognized for its independence and defiance to Soviet control. Visiting for the first time in 2003, decades after immigrating to America in 1981, Yemchuk returned in 2015 with the objective of developing a photographic […]

Evgenia Ignatova Highlights

Evgenia Ignatova Highlights   “No art is bereft of political possibility, yet, there is a strain of representation and often politicized meaning that photography is asked to perform in the 21st Century. We are perhaps losing sight of what photography does well, which is to give form to the optical unconscious of the moment that […]

Max Sher Palimpsests

  Though change is metered through the concept of progress in urban space, oftentimes there is an arrestation of form as its transitions from one set of facades to its new progressive and updated counterpart. This arrestation sees the hybridity of new and old caught in a transitional moment in which both are vying for […]

Boris Mikhailov – A Way Out (2017)

Boris Mikhailov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine and came to prominence in the 1990s. His work often focuses on the politics of everyday life during the Soviet era and its aftermath. In Red 1968-75, Mikhailov depticts life in and around Kharkov, using the colour red as a symbolic reminder of the inescapable presence of the […]

What a 1980’s Tension Memory Looks Like

@ Brad Feuerhelm   “That is just the impatient me waiting for my own teeth to fall out as I doubt I will ever find the bouffant that defines me”.   I stood sifting through the remnants of somebody else’s life, the precipice correlated somewhere between the footnote of commerce and an inability to understand […]

Cataloging Desire and a Reluctant But Necessary Eulogy in ‘Russian Interiors’

To say these images are erotic would be a mistake; they are a more like a self-enforced catalogue of sexualized ego pandering.   By Brad Feurehelm, ASX, December 2014 Andy Rocchelli’s “Russian Interiors” is first and foremost a beautifully realized book by Cesura Publishing. The tactile quality of the raised floral cover and the lifted […]

Chernobyl by Drone

  Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl   Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I’ve been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986 (the year after I was born), had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The […]

KEIZO KITAJIMA: “USSR 1991” (2012)

  In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting in […]

KEIZO KITAJIMA: “USSR 1991” (2012)

USSR 1991 In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting […]

Nikolay Bakharev in Conversation with Luca Desienna (2006)

  “There was also a clause in the Criminal Code which banned the distribution of nudity in photographs, so it put off most photographers from approach this theme.”   Nikolay Bakharev in Conversation with Luca Desienna of Gomma Magazine – Translation by Olga Ippolitova – Series Baharevland Nikolay Bakharev’s emotive and controversial images are important […]

Boris Mikhailov: “A New Metaphysician”

From Case History, 1999 Boris Mikhailov: A New Metaphysician By Helen Petrovsky If we were to define photography today, we would have to posit its essential anonymity. To be more precise, we would have to rethink the very conditions of its theorizing: it is no longer “my” photograph that has to be redeemed by being […]