Translated material
Departments | Colta.ru
From the author
Russian Post has about 45 thousand departments that are evenly distributed around the country. This is more than the number of McDonald's restaurants in the world. Every day, an average of 3 million people visit post offices. Each of them performs many functions, and those that are in villages and villages are still centers of attraction and social life.
There are no standard post offices project. Mails are the same in their functional purpose and are diverse in architectural solution. Post offices in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and other cities are recognized as architectural monuments. At the same time, ordinary post offices are often perceived by something ordinary, devoid of cultural and aesthetic value. They built into already built buildings, making changes in them, and with their catchy symbols formed a modern social urban and rural landscape, reflecting the heterogeneity inherent in all of Russia.
I shoot Russian Post offices outside and inside, collecting a portrait of modern Russia through a look at one vast organization. After calling to the cities and villages, I drove 4.5 thousand kilometers and photographed 140 post offices. Like a collector of postage stamps or tourist cards, I travel in search of unusual and memorable places. I drive along the federal intercity routes, calling into the most remote villages and villages and meet my country.
Now, like many postal services around the world, mail in Russia is undergoing a crisis. With the emergence of the Internet, she lost a monopoly on the transmission of information, and long lines, a long delivery and careless attitude to the premises made Russia's post office a meme and a symbol of poor service. Jokes about it can be found on the Internet or heard on federal channels. Now the Russian Post is striving to change, to return the trust of people and, having become a commercially successful organization, get away from state subsidies. These changes are still noticeable only in the capital and have not yet reached a deep province.
My project is not only about Russian mail, it is about walls, windows, signs and doors, about boxes, flower beds, lanterns and ramps. About their diversity in one organization. They change from city to village, from one region to another and talk about the structure of life and visual environment in modern Russia.
Work on the project began in August 2021 and is now ongoing.