Best Russian Self-Published Photobook Stable of the Year (and Best Photobook Video)

image of Lookbook


I never quite know what to make of the books that come out of the Russian Independent Self-Published Photobooks Stable but they always have a  bit of a different feel, I always enjoy them, I always end up smiling, and I always look at them again to see what the hell is going on and wondering how I can elevate myself to the higher plane of existence that the inhabitants of RISP inhabit.



image of Alla Mirokskaya's book

That's true of three of the titles that I saw this year. Anastasia Bogomolova's Lookbook Alla Mirovskaya's Old Family Photographs and Deep Space Objects and Julia Borissova's Dimitry, and Olga Bushkova's Google Wife.

And sorry if I've missed a few out because there are more I know.

Fabulous Stuff.

image from Dimitry

Buy their books by following the links above or here. And Olga Bushkova's Google Wife also came with my favourite photobook video of the year in How I tried to Convince my Husband to have Children. The title's misleading because she didn't (not in the video) or did she?

And did she really pin pictures of babies up around the wall to convince him? Is she really as obsessive as that. And is her husband as much of a jerk as he's made out to be?

Is it true or is it all just a fictional lie? And if it is who cares.

You'll have to watch the video to find out.

Here it is:





Olga Bushkova "How I tried to convince my husband to have children..." ver. 1 from Misha Bushkov on Vimeo.

A Non-Critical Review of Lookbook!

Lookbook by Anastasia Bogomolova is a fun publication! It's a book of fashion pictures. It shows Bogomolova wearing the clothes her mother and sister used to wear in the 1980s and 1990s, in the days when shopping was done at Soviet department stores or through patterns found in fashion magazines, in the days before the world was taken over by the high-end/low-end shopping polarities of Armani and H&M.

When she was a child, Bogmolova used to dress up in these clothes, and now she does so again for the purpose of the book. For each outfit she poses against a florally papered wall and goes through the gamut of the catalogue emotions. There are slightly opened lips to go with the 'tender green silk' holiday dress, hands on hips for the 'youth dress from silk with a black and white print', and the badass eyes over shoulder for the 'jacket from synthetic knitted cloth made in Japan,'




There are inserts (the book is designed by Julia Borissova) from old fashion catalogues, and they are the inspiration for the  glorious cheesiness that combines with a certain nostalgia for the childhood of which these clothes form a part.

It's a fun book then, with biography mixing with some social and fashion history. It's softcover, bound with staples, and the inside cover is a replica from an old pattern book, and you get a free poster that you can stick on the wall. I like posters.  The pictures themselves are as artlessly shot as they are posed, but I guess that's part of the fun of the experiment. It's not entirely consistent in some ways, the wallpaper works but is a slightly overdone motif, and the message and the chronology are elements that you could pick at. But that's not the point of the book, or this blog. It's not operating in that critical world. Not much photography does.

Lookbook is operating in a world where dry humour is the modus operandi. And that's a good thing. There's seriousness in her intent, and the tactile qualities of the book take us onto a sensory plane. All the time there is a little glint in Bogomolova's eye, part of the return to her childhood that this book has taken her to, and also perhaps part of her understanding of what it was like for her mother and her sister to be women back in the day. The nostalgia is personal rather than political and is linked to her experience of being a woman in contemporary Russia. What remains the same and what has changed? Not much perhaps.

So all in all, it's a lovely book.

Buy Lookbook here.