SOVIETS: Pictures from the End of the USSR
Yale University Press,
New Haven and London
Publication date Ocober 2001
9.5 x 12.5 inches
276 pages
230 duotone plates
ISBN 0-300-09112-5
$45
Order the book online at the Yale University Press website |
This unique collection of photographs documents the years surrounding the implosion of the Soviet Union. In 230 black-and-white images, we see the reality of everyday life in the fifteen former Soviet republics. These photographs — sometimes humorous, amazing, or troubling, always enthralling — offer 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, Shepard Sherbell traveled throughout the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1993 with more freedom than a Soviet 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, deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, provides a general retrospective and moving introduction to the book. He has served as New York Times bureau chief in Moscow and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.
SOVIETS was made possible thanks to the support of Corbis and Canon USA. |
