Hookers, mafia and oligarchs? This photographic exhibition shatters the common Western stereotypes of a fractured and fractious Eastern Europe. Rather it seeks to show that the Orthodox Christian faith is, in fact, a key anchor in the lives of young and old alike while life around them changes inordinately. The accents of these changes feature too in the exhibition including as it does nightlife, work life, school life and home life.
Kit Fordham’s Eastern Soul, which will be on show at London’s Pushkin House www.pushkinhouse.org.uk from 20th May to 6th June, 2008, is a provocative, hauntingly beautiful photographic odyssey is the result of years of work throughout Russia , Montenegro , Macedonia , Bulgaria and Romania forming the first installment of an ongoing project across the Orthodox Christian world. At a time when East-West tensions are on the rise Eastern Soul provides a prism through which life in the Slavic East can be viewed; lurching toward the future yet strongly bound by the traditions of the past: two thousand of years of Orthodox Christian tradition and less than 20 years of capitalism forming an inseparable whole.
Fordham visited monks in an isolated mountaintop monastery in Bulgaria, traveled the depths of Moscow’s magnificent Stalin-era underground and was granted rare access inside private homes, shops and schools as well as some of Orthodoxy’s holiest places for the purposes of this work, the first major effort by a Western visual artist to capture such a wide range of aspects of post-communist identity. Fordham may well be the only Western photographer to have his camera blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias. The resulting exhibition, Eastern Soul, provides a series of intimate glimpses of life in the post-communist East.
Kit Fordham’s Eastern Soul, which will be on show at London’s Pushkin House www.pushkinhouse.org.uk from 20th May to 6th June, 2008, is a provocative, hauntingly beautiful photographic odyssey is the result of years of work throughout Russia , Montenegro , Macedonia , Bulgaria and Romania forming the first installment of an ongoing project across the Orthodox Christian world. At a time when East-West tensions are on the rise Eastern Soul provides a prism through which life in the Slavic East can be viewed; lurching toward the future yet strongly bound by the traditions of the past: two thousand of years of Orthodox Christian tradition and less than 20 years of capitalism forming an inseparable whole.
Fordham visited monks in an isolated mountaintop monastery in Bulgaria, traveled the depths of Moscow’s magnificent Stalin-era underground and was granted rare access inside private homes, shops and schools as well as some of Orthodoxy’s holiest places for the purposes of this work, the first major effort by a Western visual artist to capture such a wide range of aspects of post-communist identity. Fordham may well be the only Western photographer to have his camera blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias. The resulting exhibition, Eastern Soul, provides a series of intimate glimpses of life in the post-communist East.
