Google翻訳
"Cheryomushki" is a photobook by Nikolai Bakharev (1946-), a photographer born in Siberia, former Soviet Union. Orphaned in his childhood and raised in a state institution, Bakharev worked as a laborer in the Siberian industrial city of Novokuznetsk in the 1970s, while also working as a photographer for the state-run photo service, taking official portraits of schools and factories. This work compiles a series of photographs taken in the 1980s, when the Soviet regime began to waver, at "Cheryomushki," riverside and lakeside beaches where workers and families gathered. While the depiction of nudity was strictly restricted in the Soviet Union at the time, these waterside locations were one of the few public spaces where a fleeting sense of liberation and intimacy was permitted. Lovers embracing, friends sharing drinks, parents gazing at their children—what is captured is not ideology, but the quiet warmth of people's bodies and emotions. Bakharev's perspective, which views his subjects not as objects of observation but as "beings with whom he creates photographs," creates a unique sense of distance that blends awkwardness and intimacy. This book quietly reveals the small glimpses of freedom and human relationships that lay beneath the surface of everyday life in the late Soviet era.
