Special places: Russia
Soviet roadside bus shelters
Broken link
From the web-based Polar inertia: journal of nomadic and popular culture, a portfolio of photographs by Christopher Herwig—a set of 19 strange and varied bus shelters observed in rural parts of the former USSR.
»more»
Unrealised Moscow
Broken link
From the Schusev State Museum of Architecture comes the web exhibition Unrealised Moscow: the architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s: unrealised projects. From the introduction:
Moscow architecture from the 1930s to the early 1950s undoubtedly occupies a central place in domestic construction of the socialist epoch. Its specific nature and scope is the most outstanding illustration of the socialist Utopia in architecture. This period saw the work of the greatest Soviet architects; B. Icfan, A. Schusev, I. Zholtovsky, the Vesnin brothers, I. Fomin, L. Rudnev, I. Golosov, V. Schuko. Among the far-reaching projections of the first stalinist “five year plans”, the 1935 General plan for the reconstruction of Moscow overshadowed all others. According to this plan, Moscow was to become, in the shortest possible time, the showpiece capital of the world’s first socialist state. The General plan envisaged the development of the city as a unified system of highways, squares and embankments with unique buildings, embodying the ideas and achievements of socialism.»more»
Frosted windows
Broken link
Frosted windows: 300 years of St Petersburg through western eyes is an exhibition of images from the collection of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. Through its glib annotations the exhibition reveals both the place observed, and the place from which it is viewed.
»more»Moving here
Broken link
Billed as the ultimate database of digitised photographs, maps, objects, documents and audio items recording migration experiences of the past 200 years, this website tells the stories of Irish, Indian, Jewish, Carribean and other people who migrated to Britain. Many of the stories are about the places they came from, and the places they came to.
»more»Chechen diary
Broken link
Photographer James Hill’s record of the war in Chechnya. He presents a slide show with audio commentary. The stories are about people’s experience of the conflict, but their setting is always a strong element in the pictures.
»more»The amber room
Broken link
Another colourful place with a Russian connection. A sumptuous chamber lined with amber, designed in 1699 for Friedrich I of Prussia’s Great Royal Palace in Berlin. It has been dismantled, packed up, shipped from palace to palace, installed and restored many times. There were several moves during the Second World War before it was again dismantled, packed into crates and taken in an unknown direction. Since then the room has been lost.
»more»The empire that was Russia
Here are photographs of the Russian empire in 1909-1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. These are colour pictures, each made with three successive filtered exposures on monochrome glass plates. The plates have recently been scanned and the colour images digitally reconstructed.
»more»