Tag: Misha Friedman

I first visited Ukrainian prisons in 2009, while working on a project for Doctors Without Borders. I remember seeing the conjugal rooms and being struck by how no two rooms were alike.

The photographer Misha Friedman and I travelled in Russia in 2016, looking, as we put it in the subtitle of a new book, “Never Remember,” “for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia.” We wanted to document memory—or the lack of memory. We began in places where I had reported two decades earlier, when memory activists, then often with the aid of local officials, created memorials or museums. We wanted to see how those sites had changed in the twenty years since, as Joseph Stalin’s image was being burnished—to the point that he now consistently tops polls asking Russians to choose the greatest man who ever lived.

Mr. Friedman has journeyed through Russia and created a series called “Photo51 — Is Corruption in Russia’s DNA?” But his images are not documentary evidence of corrupt acts. Rather, they are a visual tour of the ways in which public corruption manifests itself in people’s private lives, radiating outward through Russian society, touching ordinary men and women, and becoming the norm.

After I discovered Misha Friedman’s photographs on The Forward Thinking Museum’s website, I began to see his name everywhere. Misha is the FTM’s winner of their first quarter 2011 photography contest, as the JGS Annual Artist and recipient of a $15,000 award. His series, Donbass Romanticism, was singled out for its unflinching look at coal mines and abandoned factories and their effects on the health of the residents of Donetsk Oblast, a heavily industrialized region in eastern Ukraine.

Last summer, Misha Friedman began photographing in Donetsk Oblast, a province in eastern Ukraine, where he sought to document the health effects of coal mines and factories on the residents of this heavily industrialized region, particularly in the town of Yenakiieve