IMPERIAL POMP - Post Soviet High Rise
Imperial Pomp observes a striking architectural phenomenon that emerged across Russia and the former Soviet republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the new republics, a strangely pompous architectural style sprang up, one that conflates the aesthetics of monumental Soviet architecture with the aspirational language of Western high-rise modernity.
Over several years, Frank Herfort travelled extensively through Russia as well as countries such as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Belarus, photographing the oversized residential towers, speculative skyscrapers, and monumental housing complexes that came to define this transitional era. Rising abruptly from their surroundings, these buildings appear at once bizarre, theatrical, exotic, and strangely majestic, as if dropped into the landscape from another time, another ambition, or another ideology.
Working in the tradition of classical architectural photography and using a large-format camera, Herfort approaches these structures with precision and clarity. His images reveal buildings whose force lies not only in their scale, but in what they symbolize: a longing for lost grandeur paired with the ambition to exceed it. At once futuristic and nostalgic, these high-rises echo the visual rhetoric of Soviet memorials while projecting the confidence, excess, and spectacle of a new financial age.
More than a study of architecture, Imperial Pomp captures a fleeting historical moment in which the skyline became a stage for power, aspiration, and reinvention. Monumental and absurd, seductive and disquieting, the series portrays a post-Soviet landscape in which architecture became both promise and statement.
Each print is produced on Fine Art photographic paper by German manufacturer Hahnemühle. All prints are released in strictly limited editions: each size is limited to 10 prints, while the two largest formats are limited to only 3 prints each. Every print is accompanied by a stamped and signed Certificate of Authenticity. Framing on request.
