CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/2/2017

Forlorn monuments or strange and individualistic works of art?

Christopher Herwig’s photographs of Soviet Bus Stops never get old. “These are still the poorest areas of post-Soviet Russia,” Owen Hatherley writes, “their economies destroyed by the end of public subsidies and the command economy. In this context, the bus stops stand as forlorn monuments to an age when the people in high places still gave such areas some thought. But they also appear to contradict another preconception about the Soviet landscape – that it was extremely homogeneous. Everyone imagines the urban USSR as an endless series of identical concrete-panel slabs placed in vague, straggly wastelands, but these bus stops show another side: strange and individualistic works of art sited in green landscapes, whether the flat fields that stretch from Belarus to the Urals, or the Caucasian mountains. You might deduce from this that these bus stops are a counter-architecture of some sort, a protest against the assault on place and individuality. This would be a mistake.”