All photos © Rafal Milach. ABove: Pervouralsk

7 Rooms, Rafal Milach’s newest book, published by Kehrer Verlag, is the culmination of a long term and intimate view of modern-day Russia. Over the course of six years, Milach photographed seven young Russians through Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk, and became drawn to the “people, food, drunkenness, taxi music and landscape.” Curator Liza Faktor describes Milach’s subjects as “in their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today. Milach’s search is the kind which is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, in this book, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with our country. You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.”

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All photos © Monika Merva.

The City of Children is an extensive document of a government-run housing program for runaways and at-risk teens, located in Hungary. The program was founded in the 1950s, when the Hungarian social welfare system emphasized collective solutions to private problems. New York based photographer Monika Merva has worked on this documentary project for over 8 years. Her book The City of Children was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2010.

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Marlon Brando, 2006, photographed by Jessica Backhaus from her What Still Remains project, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2008.

“Turning points, in-between states, a beautiful kind of limbo that tugs at the heart and suggests stories of loss and remembrance. That is what photographs are, after all, memorials that stop time and hold it for a moment, for our contemplation. If Backhaus’s photographs are partly memorials to lost combs and half-eaten apples, they surely allude, as well, to other things that have been lost along the way.”

— Jean Dykstra, from the introduction of What Still Remains