GULAG

Barry Lewis

First Edition 2024
Hardcover, cloth covered with tipped-in photograph
128 pages with 79 full colour photographs
205 x 297mm
Limited edition of 800

You can purchase one or two A4 prints when you buy a copy of Gulag (see bottom two pictures)

In 1991, in the dying days of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), now the Russian Federation, I was commissioned by Geo Magazine to visit the Gulag of Siberia.

Travelling in 1991 to the Siberian Gulag would have been impossible had it not been for the reforms, in the mid 1980s, of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Leader of the Soviet Union, with his drive for political and economic restructuring (perestroika) and his call for a new era of transparency and openness (glasnost). These five years were full of a heady hope for a new future for the old empire, as the reforms revealed some of the horrors and inefficiencies of its Soviet past. The speed and ensuing chaos of the changes offered an opportunity to both ask people questions and find them willing to answer: this would have been out of the question a few years earlier, or indeed far more difficult just a year later, after Gorbachev had resigned and the Soviet Union had fallen.

I was lucky to benefit from this short period of openness.

Barry Lewis 2023

Print details:
Size: A4
Paper: Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk 310gsm
Printer: Epson SureColor SC-P700