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.”

Saha and Nastya: The only way to die is together.

Gala: I like Russia because it’s unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen when you wake up in the morning.

Yekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg

Pregnant Gala posing for portrait in her room.

Lera Stas’ wife / Krasnoyarsk

Stas: What I like best about Russia is myself

Vasya: Nowadays it’s different from in the Soyuz. I remember how my aunt, who worked at the Soviet Ministry of Culture, used to organize balls in Sverdlovsk. A neckline lower than the seventh vertebra was regarded as pornography, but now even if you ran about the stage with your tits bare, no one would say a word. These days people feel freer. The difference is that once upon a time people knew what they had to say, but they couldn’t say it. Now you can say anything, but no one knows what to say.

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.

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