The End of la Belle Epoque (SIGNED)

Misha Pedan
The End of la Belle Epoque (SIGNED)

Photographs: Misha Pedan

Text: Irina Sandomirskaia

Publisher: Khimaira Publishing

92 pages

Pictures: 84

Year: 2013

Price: 80 €

Comments: Hardcover with picture tipped-in in a cardboard slipcase, 270 x 230 mm. First edition, 2013. Black & white photographs. Text in english and in russian. Design by Anders Malmströmer. Edition limited to 500 numbered copies.The book received the 2d place in the category "Documentary Professional" at the International Photography Awards, 2013. Signed by Misha Pedan.

The pictures collected in this book were made between 1986 and 1989, at the very end of the era of socialism. The fall of the Soviet regime, according to one perspective, is the central revolutionary event of our time ; according to another, it represents its greatest geopolitical catastrophe. Both outlooks, however, presuppose a rapid dynamic in the movement of time, whether in its revolutionary overhaul, or in its collapse. In Misha Pedan's work, however, one observes neither a catastrophe nor a revolution. Time has loosened its grip ; it has lost its heroic thrust forward and upwards. A group of athletes run a relay race that starts under a sign saying "Finish".

In Eisenstein's black and white movie Battledship Potemkin from 1925 the flag hoisted on the boat is red, hand-couloured in every film frame, in every copy of the film. In The End of la Belle Epoque the red flag in one of the pictures is hand-couloured red in every copy of the book. Misha Pedan lowers the flag with the same respect as it once upon a time was hoisted.