RUSSIAN FAIRYTALES

An ambiguous journey through beauty, benevolence, and the in-between - a cinematic, dreamlike passage through Russia in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Photographed over more than ten years between the early 2000s and 2020, Frank Herfort’s long-term series traces the mystery, contradictions, and visual mythology of a country suspended between past and present. Across monumental interiors, improvised public spaces, faded ornament, and everyday encounters, the work reveals a post-Soviet world in which reality often appears more theatrical, more layered, and at times stranger than fiction.

Balancing documentary observation with a carefully composed cinematic language, Russian Fairytales unfolds through uncanny juxtapositions, quiet absurdities, and moments of suspended stillness. Like stills from a Wes Anderson film, many of the images hold a tension between lingering hope and aesthetic desolation, between the human subject and the spaces they inhabit. Humor and melancholy, intimacy and estrangement, tenderness and unease coexist within the same frame.

At the heart of the series is an attention to places that resist fixed meaning, spaces shaped by memory, symbolism, ornament, and ambiguity. Through color, atmosphere, and composition, Herfort transforms lived moments into images that feel at once documentary and faintly mythical. In them, the Russian soul appears mirrored, sometimes literally, in the gestures, expressions, and environments of its people, echoing, almost unintentionally, the emotional and visual tradition of painters such as Repin or Surikov.

Each print is produced on Fine Art photographic paper by the renowned 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.