Urbex: Photographing the Post-Soviet World
I very much enjoy taking photos
of buildings. Sometimes these subjects are best in their finished form, with sunlight
bouncing off gleaming glass skyscrapers.
This isn’t always so, sometimes the grey crumbling decay of time and
neglect make for more powerful images.
It would appear I am increasingly not the only one. Urban Decay photography and Urban Exploration
(Urbex) are gaining in popularity. There are an increasing number of websites
and glossy books appearing on the market, all full of images of buildings in
cities across the world that have, put politely, seen better days. Images of the decline of America’s famous
motor city, Detroit, are now so popular that the near bankrupt city actually
runs photographic tourism packages. One
of the best looks like, Detroiturbex.com.
I have just ordered Bradley L. Garrett’s Explore Everything, Place Hacking the City. It’s been described as ‘a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis’…..Quite a strapline. I had been following his work on Facebook, for years Mr Garrett has been touring the world, technically breaking and entering and finding his way to photographing and cataloguing the urban environment. So advanced is his experience now, including his years with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective, he has now been elevated to the respected academic position of lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Southampton.
The states of the former Soviet Union also present a brilliant backdrop for this kind of work. There is a growing fascination from those outside the region with the Soviet Architecture. This has manifested itself in several collections of photos focussed on the need to preserve images of these decaying structures as a piece of social history. Internally, to those who grew up under the rise and fall of communism these structures are not quite so enigmatic. Instead they can represent fear, repression and control. This is why they are regularly removed in favour of the ultra-modern or faux classical structures so popular in modern Moscow or Baku today.
I have chosen two notable collections of images from recent years as being stand out examples of this new genre. Both combine not only an aspect of history with social geography but with photography and, to a certain extent, travel writing.
First up is a book that inspired me, I was given Frederic Chaubin’s book CCCP for Christmas 2011. By September 2012 I was standing in Kazakhstan staring up at some of the buildings he had taken photographs of. His chosen title actually stands for Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. There are an astonishing 90 images in both colour and black and white from all over the Soviet Union: from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Tallinn in Estonia. It is physically a large volume, the pages are huge and every detail is visible. In some cases, there are also detailed colour interior shots. These are particularly effective in the northern banyas of the Baltic coast areas. The images also show concrete in both its best and worst lights: on one hand strong and starkly minimalist and on the other a crumbling and failing mess.
His work is focussed on what he termed the Forth Age of Soviet Architecture, i.e. post Stalin. He was interviewed to promote the book in 2011 and noted that the designs showed no real common themes. Instead the buildings were the physical legacy of the weird and wonderful fantastical designs which came from the minds of architects prevented from travel and caught up against the back drop of the space race in the dying days of the Soviet Union. So perhaps these could really be seen as an expression of dystopia.
Some of the buildings have been demolished but others have new capitalist lives, such as my favourite the National Bank of Georgia, formerly the ministry of highways (seen above).
My other favourites are in a gallery below; The Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; The Tashkent Circus, Uzbekistan; The Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta, Crimea; The Arasan Baths, Almaty, Kazakhstan; The Salyut Hotel, Kiev, Ukraine.
Rebecca Litchfield’s wonderful Soviet Ghosts (2014) goes a step further in terms of narrative. She writes a travelogue which is sometimes a little flowery and emotional. She focuses on the more human costs associated with the buildings she has photographed. This time there are more images from outside of the actual Soviet Union itself and more from places in East Germany and Bulgaria. The influences in the architecture are the same as Chaubin identifies. The false shrine to the myth of the scientific and progressive state in its death throws.
Litchfield is however, the more talented photographer. Her focus is, as per her narrative, on the decay of the buildings. She doesn’t rely on black and white imagery to create an atmosphere. Her images are largely colour and she shoots from an angle that fills the spaces with light. It creates the visual sense that perhaps the occupants have somehow ‘just left’ the crumbling shells of sanatoriums, hospitals, schools and military facilities. Her images of the orphanage in Estonia are particularly poignant. He work can be seen here Rebecca Litchfield Photographer
Litchfield’s real stand out series of images is the unbelievable Buzludzha in Bulgaria. She describes the trip as a test in snow bound endurance exploration and the moment she gets on to the roof as ethereal, trying to take pictures left right and centre as if she might suddenly miss something. I know what that feels like in some ways. The Buzludzha monument was finished in 1981 and is a remote amphitheatre created as an extravagant and beautiful shrine to the all-powerful Bulgarian state. It still contains the stained glass and tiles depicting the heros of the state. The internal images can be seen below.
So why is travelling to far away former communist states, taking pictures of crumbling, decaying constructions or breaking and entering derelict buildings, tunnels and power stations becoming so popular? Is it the sense of remoteness and inaccessibility, meaning you can see something no one else will? Or the sheer sense of difference and essence of a time gone?
Litchfield in her chapter The Aesthetics of Decay probably gets closest to explaining it and articulates one theory for the growing popularity of Urbex,
‘Urban exploration has pursued its own notion of beauty through the hidden spaces on the fringes of modern society, hand in hand with the ghosts that reside there…….. In modern society, seemingly obsessed with rules, and health and safety, it offers real adventures in a cosseted world. We are from an early age, warned away from these derelict and abandoned corners of our neighbourhoods with dears for our safety, or a fear of folklore, maybe even a fear of ghosts. To actively seek out these taboo spaces, urban explorers turn away from the white picket fences and ikea facades of modern life to a place where a different concept of beauty sleeps, a place of decay, unfamiliar yet alluring…....Buildings that normally do not warrant a second glance become galleries of cultural memory, exhibiting the social detritus of a recent civilisation. Braving injury and arrest, these adventurers authenticate our histories long before the historians arrive’
I have just ordered Bradley L. Garrett’s Explore Everything, Place Hacking the City. It’s been described as ‘a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis’…..Quite a strapline. I had been following his work on Facebook, for years Mr Garrett has been touring the world, technically breaking and entering and finding his way to photographing and cataloguing the urban environment. So advanced is his experience now, including his years with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective, he has now been elevated to the respected academic position of lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Southampton.
The states of the former Soviet Union also present a brilliant backdrop for this kind of work. There is a growing fascination from those outside the region with the Soviet Architecture. This has manifested itself in several collections of photos focussed on the need to preserve images of these decaying structures as a piece of social history. Internally, to those who grew up under the rise and fall of communism these structures are not quite so enigmatic. Instead they can represent fear, repression and control. This is why they are regularly removed in favour of the ultra-modern or faux classical structures so popular in modern Moscow or Baku today.
I have chosen two notable collections of images from recent years as being stand out examples of this new genre. Both combine not only an aspect of history with social geography but with photography and, to a certain extent, travel writing.
First up is a book that inspired me, I was given Frederic Chaubin’s book CCCP for Christmas 2011. By September 2012 I was standing in Kazakhstan staring up at some of the buildings he had taken photographs of. His chosen title actually stands for Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. There are an astonishing 90 images in both colour and black and white from all over the Soviet Union: from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Tallinn in Estonia. It is physically a large volume, the pages are huge and every detail is visible. In some cases, there are also detailed colour interior shots. These are particularly effective in the northern banyas of the Baltic coast areas. The images also show concrete in both its best and worst lights: on one hand strong and starkly minimalist and on the other a crumbling and failing mess.
His work is focussed on what he termed the Forth Age of Soviet Architecture, i.e. post Stalin. He was interviewed to promote the book in 2011 and noted that the designs showed no real common themes. Instead the buildings were the physical legacy of the weird and wonderful fantastical designs which came from the minds of architects prevented from travel and caught up against the back drop of the space race in the dying days of the Soviet Union. So perhaps these could really be seen as an expression of dystopia.
Some of the buildings have been demolished but others have new capitalist lives, such as my favourite the National Bank of Georgia, formerly the ministry of highways (seen above).
My other favourites are in a gallery below; The Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; The Tashkent Circus, Uzbekistan; The Druzhba Sanatorium, Yalta, Crimea; The Arasan Baths, Almaty, Kazakhstan; The Salyut Hotel, Kiev, Ukraine.
Rebecca Litchfield’s wonderful Soviet Ghosts (2014) goes a step further in terms of narrative. She writes a travelogue which is sometimes a little flowery and emotional. She focuses on the more human costs associated with the buildings she has photographed. This time there are more images from outside of the actual Soviet Union itself and more from places in East Germany and Bulgaria. The influences in the architecture are the same as Chaubin identifies. The false shrine to the myth of the scientific and progressive state in its death throws.
Litchfield is however, the more talented photographer. Her focus is, as per her narrative, on the decay of the buildings. She doesn’t rely on black and white imagery to create an atmosphere. Her images are largely colour and she shoots from an angle that fills the spaces with light. It creates the visual sense that perhaps the occupants have somehow ‘just left’ the crumbling shells of sanatoriums, hospitals, schools and military facilities. Her images of the orphanage in Estonia are particularly poignant. He work can be seen here Rebecca Litchfield Photographer
Litchfield’s real stand out series of images is the unbelievable Buzludzha in Bulgaria. She describes the trip as a test in snow bound endurance exploration and the moment she gets on to the roof as ethereal, trying to take pictures left right and centre as if she might suddenly miss something. I know what that feels like in some ways. The Buzludzha monument was finished in 1981 and is a remote amphitheatre created as an extravagant and beautiful shrine to the all-powerful Bulgarian state. It still contains the stained glass and tiles depicting the heros of the state. The internal images can be seen below.
So why is travelling to far away former communist states, taking pictures of crumbling, decaying constructions or breaking and entering derelict buildings, tunnels and power stations becoming so popular? Is it the sense of remoteness and inaccessibility, meaning you can see something no one else will? Or the sheer sense of difference and essence of a time gone?
Litchfield in her chapter The Aesthetics of Decay probably gets closest to explaining it and articulates one theory for the growing popularity of Urbex,
‘Urban exploration has pursued its own notion of beauty through the hidden spaces on the fringes of modern society, hand in hand with the ghosts that reside there…….. In modern society, seemingly obsessed with rules, and health and safety, it offers real adventures in a cosseted world. We are from an early age, warned away from these derelict and abandoned corners of our neighbourhoods with dears for our safety, or a fear of folklore, maybe even a fear of ghosts. To actively seek out these taboo spaces, urban explorers turn away from the white picket fences and ikea facades of modern life to a place where a different concept of beauty sleeps, a place of decay, unfamiliar yet alluring…....Buildings that normally do not warrant a second glance become galleries of cultural memory, exhibiting the social detritus of a recent civilisation. Braving injury and arrest, these adventurers authenticate our histories long before the historians arrive’
