Lise Sarfati: Acta Est

This is the first book by French photographer-artist Lise Sarfati, composed of images made during extended visits to Russia during the 1990s. The book is neither travelogue nor photojournalistic essay. Rather, Sarfati uses descriptions of the details of the Russian environments which fascinate her to create a visual drama – a personal theatre of dysfunction and deterioration, of change and beauty. The title – literally “it (feminine) is over” from the Latin phrase “Acta Est Fabula” meaning “the play is over” – signals her insistence that the work not be read as journalism but as a work of theatrical imagination. She builds a disturbing Tarkovsky-esque world out of concrete historical fragments – for example the architecture and factories of Norilsk, a town in arctic Siberia built and occupied by political convicts – and peoples it with lost characters – young transvestites and teenage runaways interned in “re-education” camps. Why results is a body of beautiful, engaging and disturbing photographs which are both a historical record of Russia at the end of an era, and the poetry of a visual artist conjuring her own world. The book includes a thought-provoking introduction by the Russian-born art historian Olga Medvedkova.