Prospekt Moscow
(2006-2008)

The walls of an old dacha, the serene stare of a Babushka, the fogged windows of a rickety trolleybus, the inside of a "Stolovaya", the soviet canteen. These are some of the "stills", photo fragments, visual notes that Simone Maestra wanted to record into his personal moleskine, a faithful, inseparable Polaroid. They are intimate, undoubtedly poetic memories of a stay Simone wanted us to be part of, a stay from 2006 to 2008 in an anonymous city of the vast Russian province.
An entirely new world for him, of which he didn't know culture, traditions and the difficult language, that is when photography revealed itself to him for what it really is: a direct, yet universal language indeed, but also a wonderful tool to get to know better what is next to us. This is the reason why he decided to approach this otherness, this former soviet and post-industrial territory without prejudice, just inspired by the will to understand better.
What Simone experienced is a minor, marginal, non touristic Russia. Far away from the luxurious buildings in the centre, from the flashing lights, from the roaring Humvees loaded with vulgarity, from the frantic Moscow where people fight for just a few more dollars. We are not that distant though, just a couple of hours' drive, yet enough to describe another world, other faces, other lives, a more authentic humanity of those who, in a country facing a rapid, great transformation, wish to preserve proudly its identity. Russian, indeed, and non-globalised.
After all, the epic of a people's identity is also the main theme of one of last century's most influential photographic books, 1958 Les Américains, by Swiss photographer Robert Frank, a black and white reportage of a true two years' trip deep inside America's heart. Inevitably, considering the approach, those extraordinary and revolutionary pictures are marked by a subject representation without interaction and participation, yet within a personal, expressive perspective. A contrasting narrative method that would be the basis of another meaningful publication in the early nineties, A
hundred summers, a hundred winters by Dutch photographer Bertien Van Manen, who, following upon 1990, visited several states of former Soviet Union to document their inevitable collapse. On that occasion, the photographer bonded with her subjects and became a friend who entered their private homes, met their relatives, their bonds, their stories and wishes. It is the same method Simone used, where photography turns into knowledge of others since its aim is to go deeper, to testify the personal experience and the world beyond the matter of the crucial moment.
Soviet Russia, more precisely the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was the destination of American photographer Nathan Farb in the middle of the cold war. He made a series of full-figure, definitely sociological and objective portraits of Russian citizens, published in his 1978 book Russians. On the contrary, the pivotal element of Prospekt Moscow is a personal, emotional look, poetic indeed for its imperfections and its richness in allegories, though simple as they can be. In other words, it may be an existential question which, as in Bruce Chatwin's novel, is embodied in the question "What am I doing here?".
A matter that apparently finds a parallel meaning in the dreamlike Polaroid pictures taken by Andrej Tarkovskij during his Italian "forced" stay, when the Russian director took strongly evocative and metaphorical pictures in the medieval Tuscan village of Bagno Vignoni, strongly recalling his movies and most of all nostalgia for his homeland.
Just like the Russian master, Simone used an old-time Polaroid camera to carry out his research. A difficult, unconventional choice in the IPhone era. Polaroid, the instant development camera, so imprecise and unpredictable, enabled the author to approach his subjects and develop a more intimate relation, banning empty perfectionisms and technicalities and enabling him to tread the path of pure emotion instead. The pictures are presented in small size, since these pictures do not wish to scream.

Simone wants to dedicate this book to Anna Politkovskaja, a brave journalist who inspired him during his stay. She may be the answer to his question "What am I doing here?"


                              text by Marco Citron