7 Rooms (B)

books / 2011

Why does a photographer, or anyone with the ability to create a narrative, gets drawn to a certain geographical territory to the point that he spends years in and out and most of his income looking at it in close proximity? The sense of belonging, probably? He doesn’t have to like it or even come to understand the place, but he has to love it and all that comes with it: its people, food, drunkenness, taxi music, and landscape. Rafal Milach has been haunted by Russia and its 7 people. He spent six years with those people in 3 cities: Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Krasnoyarsk. In their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today. Milach’s search is the kind that is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, in this book, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with the country. You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.

Text by Liza Faktor

I edition Kehrer Verlag , Heidelberg 2011
II edition Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2013

OUT OF PRINT

Awards / Shortlists

Paris Photo - Aperture Photography Book Award 2012 / shortlisted in the First Book category / Paris, France

POYi 2012 - winner in the best photography book of 2012 category / Missouri, USA