Fuel

This book reveals the importance of playing cards in Russian criminal culture. The hand-made decks are beautiful works of art in their own right. Prohibited by the prison authorities, they are constructed from innocuous materials procured from the everyday routine of prison life. During construction both the cards and their designs are adroitly manipulated so […]

Photographer Christopher Herwig has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bike, bus and taxi in 14 former Soviet countries discovering and documenting these unexpected treasures of modern art. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, these extraordinary bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era […]

“For us,” said Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs, “there was something supernatural about the Metro.” Visiting any of the dozen or so Metro networks built across the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1980s, it is easy to see why. Rather than the straightforward systems of London, Paris or New York, these networks […]