French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used Google Street View to
virtually navigate Russia and the former USSR, searching for
examples of a forgotten Soviet empire. The subjects of these
unlikely photographs are incidental to the purpose of Google Street
View - captured by serendipity, rather than design, they are
accorded a common vernacular. Once found, he strips the images of
their practical use by removing the navigational markers,
transforming them to his own vision. From remote rural roadsides to
densely populated cities, the photographs reveal traces of history
in plain sight: a Brutalist hammer and sickle stands in a remote
field; a jet fighter is anchored to the ground by its concrete
exhaust plume; a skeletal tractor sits on a cast-iron platform; an
village sign resembles a Constructivist sculpture. Passers by seem
oblivious to these objects. Relinquished by the present they have
become part of the composition of everyday life, too distant in
time and too ubiquitous in nature to be recorded by anything other
than an indiscriminate automaton. This collection of photographs
portrays a surreal reality: it is a document of a vanishing era,
captured by an omniscient technology that is continually deleting
and replenishing itself - an inadvertent definition of Russia
today.
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