Clothbound hardcover with tipped-in print, photographs by Miron Zownir, text by Miron Zownir, Nico Anfuso (English / German), design by Claudio Pfeifer. Edition of 500 copies, signed.

Moscow 1995. Russia has reached the climax of the post-Soviet economic transformation crisis. Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin, to whom his protégé Vladimir Putin will later pay homage as a "courageous, bold leader of Russia", has already held power for four years after the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union. Extensive privatization programs under Yeltsin’s leadership have plunged the country into chaos. The enormous transfer of state property into the hands of the oligarchs who support his government has led to the impoverishment of millions of people.
When German-Ukrainian photographer Miron Zownir travels to Moscow in the summer of 1995, he discovers an exceptional level of abject misery. While the international community pays attention to Yeltsin’s first war in Chechnya, back home on the streets of the Russian capital homeless people are rotting alive covered by flies, old women starve to death on the pavements for all the world to see, others desperately sell their last belongings or even their bodies. In the dark shadows of public awareness Miron Zownir finds a situation which he described as "Dante's Inferno" at that time. The silent brutality of his photographs is more than hard to take and adjusts the viewer’s perception into a state of nightmarish distance.
Miron Zownir’s photographic documentation of this dark chapter in Russian history, which has been ignored by much of the Western world, is now finally out in its entirety under the title Down and Out in Moscow. This publication provides unbearable evidence of a crime against human dignity, which unfortunately was never brought to indictment. It can be understood as a call for social and political reflection of world history.

Pages: 120
Place: Berlin
Year: 2014
Publisher: Pogo Books
Size: 22 x 26 cm (approx.)

---

Latest updates