
Pastoral: Moscow's Suburbs
By Alexander Gronsky
The romance of the banal has become something of a cliché in contemporary photography, but Alexander Gronsky manages to bring a fresh eye to what could have been a familiar subject. Moscow's outskirts are liminal spaces that pair the vast, impersonal slab-sided blocks of Communist-era social housing with areas of apparently untouched countryside. What appear at first to be sylvan havens or secluded beaches are always interrupted by distant walls of concrete or overhead power lines, the sand bearing the imprint of bulldozer tracks and punctured by waste pipes. Yet in every picture, people play and relax, seemingly oblivious to the contradictions. Scattered litter often gives way to proper shanty towns, while tower cranes herald the coming of vast, slab-sided blocks of 'modern' apartments for sale, the architectural differences between ideologies confined to tiny changes of detail.
Published by Contrasto, £30
Writer: Jonathan Bell