Soviet Metro Stations

Soviet Metro Stations
Christopher Herwig, Owen Hatherley
FUEL Publishing, September 2019



Hardcover | 8 x 6-1/2 inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0995745568 | $34.95

Publisher's Description:

Following his best-selling quest for Soviet Bus Stops, Christopher Herwig has completed a subterranean expedition – photographing the stations of each Metro network of the former USSR. From extreme marble and chandelier opulence to brutal futuristic minimalist glory, Soviet Metro Stations documents this wealth of diverse architecture. Along the way Herwig captures individual elements that make up this singular Soviet experience: neon, concrete, escalators, signage, mosaics and relief sculptures all combine build an unforgettably vivid map of the Soviet Metro.

With an essay by leading architecture, politics and culture author and journalist Owen Hatherley.

dDAB Commentary:

Before this year's publication of Soviet Metro Stations, photographer Christopher Herwig released two books with FUEL, both of them documenting bus stops in former Soviet countries. Although I've only seen spreads of those books on the publisher's website (Soviet Bus Stops, Soviet Bus Stops II), they exhibit a restless soul — one who traversed 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) in 15 countries — who has an eye for both the mundane and the extraordinary. That Herwig honed in on bus stops says as much about his attitude to capturing the built environment as it does about the artists and designers who created them, and whom they created them for. Seen relative to these two books, Soviet Metro Stations is a logical next step; not surprisingly it even has the same small, landscape format as the others, turning them into a series. But given that images of the Metro stations of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities has seen a flowering online and on Instagram in recent years, Herwig had his work cut out for him: the photos can't regurgitate what armchair travelers have already seen. One way he overcomes this is by venturing beyond Moscow and even Russia to other cities in former Soviet countries, but he also presents more of the stations than just the famed on-axis views of the vaulted, often highly orrnate spaces.

I've never been to Russia or any of the countries in this book, so I'm not sure if the stations are as consistently free of people as Herwig presents them. Also, given that my interests have not led me to that (large) part of the world, I couldn't get into Owen Hatherley's lengthy intro (though I'll admit he was definitely the best writer for the job) as much as I could Herwig's photos. Unfortunately the stations documented in the book — all of them completed between 1935 and 1995, quite a long period of time — are not listed in a table of contents or index; a graphic like a subway line is provided on the back cover, but backwards and without page numbers. So clearly this is a book meant for slow browsing, for lingering over the exterior views, the details of artworks and architectural surfaces, and those on-axis platform photos. I'll admit the last are most appealing to me, but not for the architectural ornament and styles. Instead, I'm drawn to the room-like qualities of the usually vaulted spaces, which arise from not seeing the tracks at the sides and the appearance as if the flooring continues all the way to the walls. So this visual trick, combined with a lack of people and trains (the number of people in the third spread below is a lot for this book), gives the long spaces some sort of hidden potential; they look like they could have some other function and it is up to the reader to imagine what. At least that's one way I look at them, though I know it would be much different if some day I finally made a visit to the former USSR.

Spreads:


Author Bio:

Christopher Herwig is a photographer who has worked commercially in London, Stockholm,Vancouver and New York. He is now based in Jordan working primarily with the Syrian Crisis. Owen Hatherley is a British writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture.

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