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Young Russians - The Post-Soviet Generation by Rafal Milach
No ermine in sight. But no pictures of the losers in the new system either: the people sleeping in the metro and the street children who today define the flip side of the Russian economic boom. And when these young Russians in their steel-blue worker’s overalls peer into the camera, they are certainly not uniformed working-class heroes. Rafal Milach preferred to avoid the commonplace extremes. The superrich and the desperately poor: those images of the country’s sharp contrasts would have been a too simplistic subject. Instead, Milach turns his lens to Russian society where its future is manifest: the generation of 30-somethings. These are Russians for whom the USSR perhaps provided their early upbringing but who have grown up under the dripping faucet of Western pop-culture. The sometimes strange backgrounds – the high-rise flats behind the military jet, the bare walls of a student dormitory – provide at second glance something that soon seems almost familiar in its unimportance. At some point Milach’s essay takes on a dynamism of its own. That is noticeable in the authenticity of his emotional nuances. The more time the photographer invested in his project, the sharper the focus became. Soon the locations of his first images – military academies, correctional facilities– were supplanted by pictures of young people, who often enough became friends. The increasingly close contact and intimacy, but also the variety of the individual characters, thus tell us more, and more exactly, about the mood of a Russian generation than thousands of images of the extremes.
