Postmortem Snaps

...The introductory picture in Jason Eskenazi’s photo book is “Hotel Moskva, Moscow” (1998...

...By spending as long as he did in the former Soviet territories and becoming as familiar as he did with the people, Eskenazi has been able to produce a book of great intimacy...

...they are meant to illustrate the Stalinist slogan, “We were born to make fairy tales come true”—with the understanding that in the primitive version of the story, the wolf gets to eat Little Red Riding Hood...

...In “Abortion Clinic, St...

...And the impression over and over again is that not just the landscape and the urban environment have been damaged, but that the people, too, are in need of repair...

...And in “Pagan Holiday, Georgia” (1997), a young girl with big white bows in her hair covers her face with her hand and turns away to avoid seeing the severed head of a cow in a nearby wagon...

...Behind her is a lace curtain suggesting Old World gentility, and from the window she looks down on impressive buildings of classic Russian style and an open square in which little fi gures mill about...

...And the sight of John, Paul, George, and Ringo juxtaposed with these casually disregarded dead is an example of Eskenazi’s talent for composition...

...In “Millennium, Red Square, Moscow” (2000), a young couple off to the right kiss as they await the future...

...much history took place in the vicinity of the hotel, and presumably it is that history and its aftermath that absorb her...

...Dimly lit men with shaven heads sit in gray coveralls at long tables eating gruel from metal bowls, their hopelessness summed up in the fi gure of a woman attendant in a white smock standing with her back to them as she gazes longingly out a window...

...The torsos of two male fi gures lie side-by-side in the grass in “Communist Statues, Lithuania” (1998...

...The pictures of life in rural areas show they have changed surprisingly little from before the revolution...

...The 77 black-and-white pictures here are nothing like National Geographic’s scenic vistas...

...The lower right quarter of the image is taken up with the naked back and shoulders of a young woman, as well as the little bit of her face and head that are visible as she looks out a window...

...BY WILLIAM MEYERS It begins quietly enough...

...there is no more privacy there than in a nail salon...

...The walls of the room in “Abandoned Asylum, South Ossetia” (1997) are covered with graffi ti and, although it may be abandoned, there is a man sleeping in the single iron bed, his shoes arranged neatly on the fl oor...

...Because she is so intent on what is going on outside, the feel of the image is not so much sensual as contemplative...

...This sounds typically Russian, and it is not encouraging...

...His work, by turns, is grotesque, comic, surreal, lyric, or elegiac, and sometimes includes several of these characteristics simultaneously...

...We do not see the face of the man wearing the T-shirt, but his apparent insouciance is a measure of the brutality of the confl ict in Chechnya...

...Soviet health care was once held up as a model, but Eskenazi’s pictures of care facilities defi nitively end that illusion...

...In the left foreground, in some sort of open public space, are the bodies of four dead men, the Russian soldiers, one of them lying face down in a shallow puddle of water...

...The Moskva Hotel is located within 100 yards of the point from which Russian roads are measured, so it is an appropriate place for Eskenazi to begin his travels...

...On the right we see a close-up of a T-shirt being worn by a young man printed with the faces of the four Beatles, and in the background, to the left, is a heroic Soviet-style statue commemorating victory in World War II...

...He spent much of the 1990s photographing the lands behind what had been the Iron Curtain: Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, East Germany, Georgia, Chechnya, Lithuania, and of course, Russia proper...

...He said in a recent interview that he believes “the image is much deeper in our brain stem than language,” and many of his pictures seem closer to the psychological depth of genuine fairytales than to ordinary photojournalism...

...This image testifi es to Eskenazi’s technical sophistication, especially his feeling for light, but so does “Psychiatric Hospital, Kazan” (1992...

...They are the sort of images that, once seen, lodge in the mind...

...in the middle distance dark groups of millennial celebrants shift about, but it is the beer bottles and litter on the cobblestones close at hand that seem to portend what is to come...

...William Meyers’s photography project, Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan, is a forthcoming exhibit at the New York Public Library...

...The eight women in “Harvest, Mariel Republic, Russia” (1999) wear what appear to be traditional ethnic dresses and stand in a large fi eld of grain holding scythes...

...The three little iron cribs in “Maternity Hospital, Kuba, Azerbaijan” (1999) are empty, and the only sign of life is a pigeon perched on one of them...

...He learned Russian, established friendships, and spent time with Yevgeny Khaldei, the great photographer of World War II whose picture of Russian soldiers planting the red fl ag atop the Reichstag has the same place in Soviet iconography that Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the fl agraising on Iwo Jima has in ours...

...Among the four pictures from Chechnya, “Bombed-Out Circus” and “Rooftop,” both taken in Grozny in 2000, show the destruction that buildings in that Muslim republic have suffered, but “Dead Russian Soldiers, Chechnya” (1996) deals with human beings...

...In a postscript, Eskenazi writes about the Russians that their inability “to confront their history and loss created a nostalgia for tragedy...

...Petersburg” (1996), the attractive woman on a gurney in the foreground has a look of resignation on her face, while beyond her a woman lying in street clothes has her legs spread for a woman in scrubs...

...There are memorable pictures of military personnel in training, of ballerinas at ease backstage, of dachas and graduation celebrations, of movie sets and movie theaters...

...In “Harvest Ritual, Shutilova, Russia” (1999), three ancient women in babushkas sit on the ground “mourning” over a similarly attired scarecrow lying “dead...

...Equally enduring after 70 years of communism are the pagan rituals of people close to the soil...

...they have been decapitated, and we can see that they are hollow...

...A draft horse seen in profi le in the background reminds us of nature’s puissance...

...in the background the storied spires and walls of the Kremlin are lit up and look like Disneyland...