Travel Sketches: Russia

In October of 1992, I went alone to Moscow and St. Petersburg out of photographic curiosity. I don't speak Russian and could barely transliterate the street signs, so spent all day each day just walking, looking, and making photographs. The gracious hospitality of the people who rented me a space in their homes allowed me to wander at will through the streets. It was a peculiar moment, a brief chaotic liberation between the collapse of Communism and the rise of the new autocracy. I doubt if many of these pictures could have been made a year or two earlier or later.