I really love good photo albums, especially with photos of Minsk or Belarus. So, when someone I know shared a link in the spring of 2019 to a crowdfunding campaign for a book of photographs by Sergei Brushko, I had almost no doubts and immediately contributed. No, I didn’t know about photojournalist Sergei Brushko at the time, but I really liked several of the shared photographs and the theme of the book. And finally, my copy reached me, and I was able to look through it calmly and even read it (as it’s not just a photo album).
Sergei Brushko passed away in 2000, but during his career, he worked as a photojournalist for several Belarusian publications, and as a documentary photographer, he participated in several international exhibitions. His son, Dmitry Brushko, followed in his father’s footsteps, and it was Dmitry who initiated the release of this book and served as its compiler.
The book is a hefty volume of about 224 pages, featuring photographs by Sergei Brushko from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. The book is aptly titled Zmena—a word that in Belarusian translates literally as “shift” or “change.” This was indeed a time of major transformations, not only in Belarus but in the entire USSR and the newly independent former republics that emerged suddenly. Brushko, as a photojournalist, captured the life of those years: from empty store shelves to rallies on the streets of a newly independent country, still unaware that there was no way back.
In addition to the photographs, Dmitry Brushko included short essays in the book, offering people’s reflections on those times: what was in the air, what changes followed, and how people perceived them.
All captions and texts are presented in three languages—Belarusian, Russian, and English—making the book accessible to three different audiences from the start.
Some of the individual photographs are truly excellent, and the photographer succeeded in capturing moments and people’s emotions. I have no regrets about sponsoring this project.
However, when looking at the book as a whole, my overall impression was quite mixed.
As I mentioned, I love photo albums. And though I’m not a professional in this field, I can still compare publications. While there are quite a few photographs, the structure of their presentation lacks clarity. They jump around both in terms of years and even events (the same event is presented at the beginning of the book and again toward the end). The book is formally divided into several sections, with essays matching the theme of each section. But the photographs themselves don’t always clearly align with the section they are placed in based on objective criteria.
During my viewing, I had serious complaints about the layout of the photos on the pages, as well as their descriptions. On many pages, there’s a large amount of empty space, while the photos themselves end up being quite small. And when contact prints are included, it’s unclear why they were printed at such a size, where you can hardly make out anything.
There’s a lot of empty space on the pages, yet it’s not used for captions. All captions (and I mean EVERY SINGLE one) are in the last 20 pages of the book. So if you want to understand what’s depicted in each photo, you have to keep a finger on the last section—look at the photo, then flip back to the last section to read the description. This is EXTREMELY inconvenient.
The essays are interesting on their own, as they provide a view of those years through the eyes of witnesses. However, I didn’t recognize most of the authors’ names. The essays themselves are only indirectly related to the photographs. They convey the spirit of the time, helping to better understand the images, which is a good thing.
But when it comes to the photographs themselves, there aren’t as many as I expected for a 200-page book. There aren’t enough to cover the entire era, and they fragmentarily show the events of those years.
The photographs are good, but when you read that the photographer left behind an “invaluable collection of documentary photography,” I was left wondering—where is this collection after seeing the book?
In any case, I thank Dmitry Brushko for undertaking this project. Perhaps I just expected much more, having seen various photo albums like One Day in the Life of the Soviet Union from 1987.
My rating: 3/5
Official website of the book: http://brushko.by/book/eng
