USSR 1991

257 × 188 mm
280 pages
152 images
Softcover
2025
English / Japanese

In January 1991, Keizo Kitajima began a year-long series for the Japanese magazine Asahi Graph, traveling across all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union with journalist Kazumasa Nishioka.

At a turning point in his career, and considering abandoning snapshot photography altogether, Kitajima unexpectedly found himself documenting the final months of the USSR. Only days after the final installment of the series was published in Asahi Graph in December 1991, the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.

In his photographs, Kitajima captured something essential about each place he visited—not through symbolic locations or famous figures, but by focusing on ordinary people whose stories might otherwise have remained untold.

The 2025 publication of USSR 1991 is part of an ongoing re-examination of Kitajima’s earlier work, following books such as European Diary 1983–1984 and New York (New Edition). As part of this process, Kitajima decided to present his USSR 1991 photographs alongside a series made between 1983 and 1984 in various Eastern European cities.

In addition to an afterword by Keizo Kitajima, USSR 1991 includes an essay by Shino Kuraishi.

“The subjects and themes of this book are extremely diverse. Whereas the majority of Kitajima’s previous work focused on capturing, within the narrow scope of the street, the distinctive characteristics of anonymous passers-by, this series also includes subjects of cultural and historical significance: clergymen, politicians, actors, the remains of an assassinated singer, scholars, members of royal families, and others.

Kitajima presents them side by side, in complete equality, with ordinary people from various professions and backgrounds.

One of the enduring threads of Kitajima’s long-term observations is his sustained focus on the individuality of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. An example is his recurring attention to people of Korean descent living throughout the Soviet Union: a portrait of a girl in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (formerly Toyohara) standing in front of a house from the Japanese colonial period; a university professor; a journalist; and a Korean family living in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan.

The portrait of the girl, in particular, conveys the resilience of people who, torn from their roots and forced to settle in a distant land, endured by making it a new home. Despite the vast distances between Siberia and Central Asia, the places and portraits in the book also preserve the memory of Japan’s twofold responsibility toward the Korean people: first through colonial rule, and later through postwar neglect.”

— From Shino Kuraishi’s essay Scattered Individuals and Differences