cover image Another Russia: Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers

Another Russia: Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers

Daniela Mrazkova. Facts on File, $35 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-8160-1553-5

These revelatory black-and-white photographs, testimonies produced within the past decade by 18 resident Soviet artists, represent a dramatic departure from the propaganda images familiar to Westerners, in which ""everyone is happy and laughing and with great optimism participates in the work of construction.'' Disclosed is a world not often seen by outsiders: Soviet citizens share a meal in a cemetery; country women walk barefoot to spare their shoes; Lithuanian markets teem with pigs, poultry and cattle; a woman stands apart as nomad men feast in a tent; a circus acrobat gracefully twists into a bizarre shape. But many readers will be discouraged by the lack of captions, a somewhat obscure narrative and an unwieldy, disorganized format that requires excesssive leafing among the pages to match photographs and text. The husband-wife authors, photohistorians, live in Czechoslovakia. (October 25)