Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Soviet Signs and Street Relics

Soviet Signs and Street Relics

Guilbeau, Jason
Murray, Damon
Sorrell, Stephen

Hardcover

General ArtGeneral PhotographyRussian History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1916218407
ISBN13: 9781916218406
Publisher: Fuel Pub
Published: Jun 16 2020
Pages: 192
Weight: 1.40
Height: 0.79 Width: 8.03 Depth: 6.54
Language: English

Russia's forgotten world of avant-garde public signage--the latest in Fuel's collectible Soviet series

For this volume, French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used Google Street View to virtually navigate Russia and the former USSR, searching for examples of a forgotten Soviet empire. The subjects of these unlikely photographs are incidental to the purpose of Google Street View--captured by serendipity, rather than design, they are accorded a common vernacular. Once found, Guilbeau strips the images of their practical use by removing the navigational markers, transforming them according to his own vision.

From remote rural roadsides to densely populated cities, the photographs reveal traces of history in plain sight: a brutalist hammer and sickle stands in a remote field; a jet fighter is anchored to the ground by its concrete exhaust plume; a skeletal tractor sits on a cast-iron platform; a village sign resembles a constructivist sculpture. Passersby seem oblivious to these objects. Relinquished by the present they have become part of the composition of everyday life, too distant in time and too ubiquitous in nature to be recorded by anything other than an indiscriminate automaton.

This collection of photographs portrays a surreal reality: it is a document of a vanishing era, captured by an omniscient technology that is continually deleting and replenishing itself--an inadvertent definition of Russia today.

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