ARCHITECTURE
FUEL 192 illustrations 16.0 x 20.0cm 192pp | Hardback 978 1 916 218406 April | £24.95
A new book in FUEL’s highly popular and collectable Russian series.
Jason Guilbeau; Edited by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell; Introduction by Clem Cecil
Soviet Signs and Street Relics 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, captured by serendipity rather than design, are accorded a common vernacular. Once found, he strips the images of their practical use by removing the navigational markers, transforming them into his own vision. 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. Relinquished by the present, these objects 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.
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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. Jason Guilbeau is a photographer who lives and works in Strasbourg. Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell have been publishing books on Soviet culture since 2004, from the
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia to Soviet Bus Stops. Clem Cecil is a Russian speaking specialist in language, literature and architectural preservation, with many years’ experience working in Russia, initially as correspondent for The Times, then as co-founder of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society.