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7 Rooms (second edition)

by Rafal Milach

Photographs: Rafal Milach

Text: Svietlana Alexievich

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag

152 pages

Pictures: 60

Year: 2011

ISBN: 978-3-86828-265-8

Comments: size: 16,5 x 20 cm, second edition, design by Ania Nalecka/TBD

Why does a photographer, or anyone with an ability to create narrative, gets drawn to a certain geographical territory to the point that he spends years in and out and most of his income to look at it at a 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 which 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 your 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. Liza Faktor

Rafal Milach is a member of the Sputnik Photos collective.

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