It was a chilly day in December 2014, and I used to be ready for the practice at Shchukinskaya, a station on the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya Line of the Moscow Metro.
Though the subway trains in Moscow are celebrated for his or her punctuality, this specific practice was operating late, giving me longer than ordinary to gaze on the surroundings round me.
There, in a utilitarian station not sometimes celebrated for its magnificence, I seen the uniformly sculpted aluminum panels alongside the observe. Their patterning was mesmerizing. I snapped a number of fast images.
A second later, my practice arrived. I boarded a automobile together with the remainder of the gang and departed the station.
My expertise at Shchukinskaya was a fleeting and seemingly insignificant occasion, and but it launched me on a challenge that I had been contemplating for years — one that might occupy greater than half a decade of my skilled life.
Between 2014 and 2020, I photographed all the present Soviet-era metros, finally visiting greater than 770 stations in 19 cities. My purpose was to create as near a full archive of the metros as I probably might.
It wasn’t simply the person stations that captured my creativeness — although many are undeniably beautiful in their very own proper. Rather, it was your complete underground system, each in Moscow and increasing out to different former Soviet cities, that impressed me: the mystique, the immensity, the pervading sense of colossal authority.
I used to be additionally drawn to report numerous particulars: lamps, benches, tiles, ornaments, mosaics, staircases, elevators and different handmade artworks of marble or wooden.
For a very long time the challenge appeared impossibly daunting. The variety of stations felt limitless, every stuffed with transecting passengers and ornamental options.
The Moscow Metro alone, which opened in 1935 and serves as a propagandistic mannequin of Soviet may, has greater than 200 stations and spans tons of of miles.
And but the sweetness and grandeur of the stations propelled me ever onward — to go to the subsequent, and the subsequent, and the subsequent.
Capturing lots of the stations devoid of passengers imbued the pictures with a way of timelessness. But doing so wasn’t simple; it meant that almost all of those footage needed to be taken both earlier than 6 a.m. or after 11 p.m.
Restrictions on images, as soon as commonplace in Russia and all through the previous Soviet Union, have modified dramatically, even within the final decade. (Authorities in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, lastly lifted the ban on images in its metro stations in 2018, for instance.)
Still, metro authorities weren’t all the time happy with my presence. More than 50 occasions, inside varied stations, I used to be instructed that images was not permitted. Once, in Tashkent, I used to be pressured at hand over my digicam’s reminiscence card.
Often the challenge felt like a sport of cat and mouse. At sure moments I felt like a legal, even supposing my solely intentions have been to seize the stations’ magnificence.
Sometimes I got here again to a single station time and again, having studied when its attendants or law enforcement officials had lunch breaks or shift adjustments.
There have been, nonetheless, welcome exceptions. At Elektrozavodskaya, a cease in Moscow, a policeman provided recommendations on the way to seize the station’s most beautiful aspects. He additionally gave me the contact data for metro employees who might assist modify the lighting.
After photographing Moscow’s stations, I moved on to St. Petersburg, whose metro — its development lengthy delayed by the brutal siege of Leningrad — opened in 1955.
From there I started venturing farther afield — to Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan. Eventually I additionally visited a handful of cities whose metro techniques, whereas not formally attributed to the Soviet Union, have been both constructed or considerably altered through the Soviet period, and even partially constructed by Soviet architects and engineers. These included the metro stations in Bucharest, Budapest and Prague.
I confronted the identical query in nearly each metropolis I visited: “Why are you photographing right here?” folks would ask.
Many couldn’t perceive why a seemingly tedious challenge centered on such widespread areas can be fascinating for me. These stations, in spite of everything, have been locations that almost all commuters handed by day-after-day — by necessity greater than selection.
But typically a passer-by, seeing me see a station they’ve seen a thousand occasions, would discover one thing anew, one thing I’d aimed my digicam at: a stupendous ceiling, a carved handrail, an ornately ornamental lamp. And then, I knew, they understood.
Frank Herfort is a documentary and architectural photographer primarily based in Moscow and Berlin. His e-book, “CCCP Underground,” will probably be printed within the coming months. You can comply with his work on Instagram.
Source: NY Times
