The Authentic Guide To Russian And Soviet Camaras

Records that might be lost were it not for this book will be welcomed by collectors, dealers, photography historians, and museums as a guide to hundreds of cameras and accessories manufactured in the former USSR.

The “utterly fascinating” untold story of Soviet Russia’s global military mapping program—featuring many of the surprising maps that resulted (Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and London to towns like Pontiac, MI, and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. The information on these maps ranged from the locations of factories and ports to building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by Soviet spies on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

A technical reference book covering Soviet personnel and equipment losses in wars and other military actions, from the 1918 civil war to Afghanistan.

Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.