‘Faces of the East’: Post-Soviet lives through a German’s lens (PHOTOS)

Philipp is a Munich native, an Oxford history and politics graduate and currently a researcher with the University of Antwerp. He’s been going back and forth between Germany and Russia for travelling and work just so he could come back and see his friends. And - as he says - because Moscow has a hold over him, and he’d love to live here again, given the chance.

With his ‘Faces of the East’ Facebook project, he’s doing a stellar job of combining photos with stories, telling it like it is and giving his audience an unvarnished glimpse into the real lives of his post-Soviet subjects.

The captions underneath the photos are reduced tidbits of the full stories you will find on the Facebook page. 

“I have always been fascinated by Russia and other post-Soviet countries, learned Russian, have worked and lived in Moscow and I keep coming back to the region to visit friends and to travel.”

“One thing that has always struck me about the region is the abundance of peculiar characters with unique life stories. So many of them strange, dark, absurd, funny or sad, and always profound. In short, touching upon the whole spectrum of the human experience from dark to bright in an unfiltered and intense way that is rarely encountered in the West.”

“I particularly like exploring how political, societal and economic developments shape, and are shaped by people, and how individual life stories fit into the larger current and historical developments, which have been so turbulent in the post-Soviet space.”

“Indeed, life stories there are often shaped by the experience of communism, terror, deportations, wars, but also great technological achievements, art and peaceful cooperation and the mixing of so many different peoples with their own cultures and histories. Probably there is no other place in the world that is so rich in unique and often crazy stories.”

“While I was always fascinated by these kinds of stories, on a trip to Central Asia in 2016 I also started taking portraits of people. When I arrived in Almaty Kazakhstan to visit a friend, I was captivated with the uniqueness of the faces of people there… You could meet people like a guy with Asiatic features and blue eyes, whose German grandfather and Korean grandmother were deported from their respective homelands to the Kazakh steppe during Stalin’s reign, while he would have a Ukrainian grandfather who came as a rocket scientist to work in Baiknonur and a Kalmyk grandmother who had come as an enthusiastic Komsomol member to develop the ‘virgin lands’ of Kazakhstan.”

“I joked to my friends that people in Central Asia - or indeed the whole post-Soviet world - were taking hipsterism to another level. While elsewhere people tried to distinguish themselves primarily with their clothing or accessories to come across as individualist and unique, people in Central Asia would stick out just by their exceptional faces and stories.”

“So I started collecting these portrait shots and posted them along with stories on my facebook page. This has become somewhat of a permanent hobby of mine. By now I have several hundred portraits with stories, mainly from Russia and Central Asia, but also from Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus and of the Russian speaking diaspora in Europe, as well as from the Middle East and Africa.”

“Many friends have told me to make the portraits and stories accessible to a wider audience and so I recently set up a facebook page called “Face of the East” on which I regularly publish new stories.”

“Currently I am mainly posting pictures from a travel through Russia during the World Cup last summer that took me from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod and then along the Volga through Chuvashia, Tatarstan, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Saratov to Volgograd and then through Kalmykia to the North Caucasian spa towns, Kabardino-Balkaria and further through Chechnya to Dagestan.”

“The immense cultural richness of the post-Soviet region and its often multi-layered identities are not only fascinating, but also widely unknown in the West. That’s why I am also trying to convey impressions on a personal level from a region that is still largely known for its negative and simplistic stereotypes and a narrow focus on its power politics.”

“I was also inspired by Belarusian Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s books like “Second hand time”, in which she published interviews of people from the former USSR depicting their unbelievable and often tragic life stories.”

Philipp has much, much more to show us, and his ‘Faces of the East’ page is but a small sample of what’s to come in the near future. If the dozens of photos we’ve seen are any indication, you’re in for a very intimate journey. Stay tuned!

Make sure to visit Philipp’s Facebook page ‘Faces of the East’, which he updates regularly with new photo stories of post-Soviet life.