Description
ALAN GIGNOUX Russian Rust Belt
ALAN GIGNOUX Russian Rust Belt. The exceptional mineral wealth in the Urals has provided the resources for Russia’s economic development and military defence for over 300 years. In the twentieth century, the region became central to Stalin’s plans to modernise the Soviet Union and drive the transition to a world-class industrial economy.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the people of the Urals were left to endure the punishing legacy of the Soviet industrial project: failing industries, abandoned factories, outdated, and dilapidated industrial equipment, decaying housing, job losses, population loss and life-threatening environmental degradation. Russia’s crucible had become the nation’s rust belt.
Russian Rust Belt incorporates Gignoux’s photographs of the Ural industrial region taken during a residency with the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg in 2009. The design of the book takes as its inspiration the Soviet era photobooks produced between 1920 and 1941.
Soviet photobooks used cutting edge design features, such as bold and original typography and graphic devices, wallpapers, fabric inserts, photomontage, cut-outs, overlays, gatefold pages, extended foldouts, and half pages, to impressive effect, creating inspirational, modern, confident books that reflected and celebrated a shared Utopian vision.
Russian Rust Belt deconstructs those devices to reflect the dismantling of the Soviet project, and the resulting impact on the people living with that legacy, visualized in response to a series of words: fracture, rupture, shatter, splinter, decay, corrode, crumble, fall apart. The photobook aims to embody in terms of design, form, and content the Russian rust belt experience, with its specific Soviet and post-Soviet character.
Limited edition of 100.
Alan Gignoux
Alan Gignoux is an award-winning documentary photographer and founder of Gignoux Photos, which produces documentary photography and film projects focussing on socio-political and environmental issues around the world.
Gignoux is committed to exposing the effects of displacement on communities around the world. His most exhibited body of work, Homeland Lost, juxtaposes portraits of Palestinian refugees with their former homes in Israel. He has been a regular visitor to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria, building relationships and recording camp life since 2005. For his current project, “You can see me, but I don’t exist,” he uses a camera obscura to document asylum seekers living in limbo in European cities.
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