.
Mariann Tihane from Tartu Ülikool writes:
Where do you dig up these stunning photos?
Being from the milder western corner of the Soviet Union, these post-apocalyptic shots simultaneously trigger a hyperreal sense of nostalgia and stir uncanny feelings in me. An almost ethereal sort of distance-closeness. Some of the photos resemble my own back-alley streets. Others take still more violent turns in the imagination.
An amazing assortment.
.
Спасибо большое, Марянн! Thanks, but for now the secret to my #doomporn database must remain classified.
It´s interesting how I could find a lot of places in Hungary with exactly the same buildings (except those sea’s photos, of course).
Nice arty pictures, but… would you want to live in such surroundings?
Yes.
Spending my early childhood in a neighbourhood with public housing flats (obviously not in the USSR, though), I can just feel the nostalgia by looking at these pictures. Not only for the aesthetics, also for the camaraderie that came naturally to living in such a place.
The moment we moved to a ‘petit-bourgeois’ house was a sad one indeed, one even a 11 year old could perceive.
Post-war public housing was no Narkomfin by any means, but it did certainly have a powerful esprit to it.
Reblogged this on Éphémérides.
I grew up in a decaying urban communist environment like this, in Bulgaria, in 1980s. When we were children nothing around us was ever ugly. I remember power cuts and food shortages, but life was exciting, even queuing for hours to buy a t-shirt with some colourful print on it was amazing. There was no colourful clothes in the shops, there was hardly any clothes in the clothes shops, and hardy any shops in fact. So waiting for hours to buy one was one of my most exiting experiences as a child. Colour was in shortage, everything was concrete and gray, yet life had all the colours imaginable. It may seem ugly to you today, but people had meaning in their concrete urban environments, and that was not ugly at all.