Siberia: In the Eyes of Russian Photographers

by Leah Bendavid-Val

Filled with unforgettable images of Siberia’s people and landscape, this fascinating, panoramic book reflects its subject’s rich and complex culture. The word Siberia brings to mind a series of extremes—vast, bleak, harsh, alluring, wild, and beautiful. Our imagined notion of this largely unknown territory is so strong that the name itself has become a metaphor for things remote or undesirable. The reality, however, is that Siberia surpasses any singular idea. Not only does it span numerous time zones and feature enormously varied geography, but its inhabitants range from nomads herding reindeer and shamans communing with spirits to scientists in state-of-the-art laboratories and urbanites surrounded by boutiques, museums, and opera houses. Spanning some 130 years, this collection of images by more than 50 Russian photographers conveys as never before Siberia’s enormity and diversity while bringing the region into concrete, human focus. It draws from rarely visited collections in Russian museums as well as the work of established and emerging photographers. This beautiful volume is at once a groundbreaking photographic event and a sublime introduction to one of Earth’s most intriguing places.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2013

About the author

Leah Bendavid-Val is a historian of photography who has worked with Russian photographers for more than two decades. She is the author most recently of Song Without Words: The Photographs & Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy (published in October 2007). Her two earlier books about Russian photographers and themes are Propaganda & Dreams (1999); and Changing Reality (1991).

Bendavid-Val is former Director of Photography Publishing for National Geographic Books. Books published in her program for popular and professional audiences have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bendavid-Val is author of two books on the history of National Geographic photography—Stories on Paper & Glass (2001) and the best-selling National Geographic: The Photographs (1994), which is still in print. She is co-author and editor of National Geographic Image Collection, on the New York Times Bestseller List in December 2009.

Based on her Russia and National Geographic work, Leah Bendavid-Val has served as curator for exhibitions at the International Center for Photography, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and other museums. She teaches writing and book publishing for photographers at the Santa Fe Workshops in New Mexico. She was Commencement Speaker for the University of Maryland Department of Philosophy, Class of 2008.

(from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/l...)

Reviews

[The Art Book Review · Rating 4 out of 5]

"These are more fanciful in their use of light and color, and in some cases, in terms of the comfort and demeanor of the people in the pictures. It rounds out an expansive view of the region, one ample enough to reorient Western viewers’ understanding of a vast land we can hopefully begin to view as more than “daunting and inhospitable.”

John McIntyre on "Siberia: In the Eyes of Russian Photographers"

Read the full review here:
http://theartbookreview.org/2014/04/2...

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved looking at these photos that had been banned for so many years.