The ideas behind the project

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It all started when I found myself wandering through the gloomy streets of Chișinău during the cold winter of 2017. Elated by the discovery of a visual atmosphere recalling the last years of the Soviet Union, I immediately became fascinated by the dramatic equilibrium between blandness and individuality, insignificance and monumentality that personified the contradictory architecture of the Soviet Union. Or perhaps, it started before, one year and a half earlier to be precise, when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity took me out of rural France to work in central Berlin. By a twist of fate, my first flat was located on Frankfurter Allee, near the Frankfurter Tor, and the vision of the massive Karl-Marx-Allee, especially its abrupt contrast between 'socialist realism' and 'ostmodernism' had a deep impression on me, who had then never traveled outside of Western Europe before. In fact, there is no genuinely definite answer: both cities, in their own ways, introduced me to the fascinating world of post-war architecture and commissioned public art, a world immensely threatened by its 'planned obsolescence', materially first, and more significantly morally, since the peculiar aesthetics of modernist architectural trends have so far failed to achieve any significant recognition within the general population, to say the least. 

 

To these two cities, I will add a third one: Bucharest, where I lived from 2017 to 2019 before moving across the border to Budapest. Bucharest is an odd mess, not particularly appealing from an architectural point of view due largely to the utter lack of taste characterizing Ceausescu's haphazard reconstruction of the city. 'Balkan kitsch' was favored over 'East modernism' decades before Skopje, making interesting modern buildings quite a rarity in what was however one of the largest metropolises of the Eastern Bloc. The local subway is an exception to this bland heritage. It is simply stunning, diverse, impressively well-built (compared to the city above ground), and surprisingly well-conserved to this day. This is precisely in the Bucharest subway that I began my first architectural photographic project. My goal was simple: I wanted to photograph every station in the network to highlight their individuality, but the project was bound to lead nowhere due to the severe limitation of the rudimentary gear I was using at the time (I started with an entry-level mobile phone!), and the… less than accommodating attitude of local security agents. Years have elapsed, I bought a better camera, and the number of cities I photographed grew exponentially, hence the logical step of sharing my project with an audience. This is how Forsken Modernity came to be.

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Forsaken Modernity is a constant work in progress, an attempt to compile buildings, statues, memorials etc. dating from the second half of the 20th century into a location-based database. This temporal delimitation is not set in stone as I sometimes include buildings from the inter-war period (the Czech Republic is chock-full of outstanding pre-World Word II modernist buildings that I couldn’t overlook) or as recent as 2020. Moreover, I do not treat all decades equally. The 1950s in the East were characterized mainly by the widespread diffusion of ‘Socialist Realism’, a dramatic architectural and artistic setback that has been extensively studied and which is well accepted within the general population. Ironically enough, if ‘socialist realism’ is a crude import of Stalinism, its legacy is never affected by contemporary drives to ‘purge the public space from Communist architecture’. Consequently, I have deliberately chosen to not focus on the topic. You’ll find a few iconic socialist realist landmarks on Forsaken Modernity, but these are not the main points of the project. ‘Communist architecture’ almost invariably refers to the much-hated modernist trends developed from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. It is precisely the legacy I sought to highlight with Forsaken Modernity. This legacy is controversial and highly threatened. Post-war modernism in the East (and, to some extent, in the West as well) is akin to a severely endangered species that few want to save. In societies so obsessed with classical architecture and traditional forms, regardless of their authenticity (actually, real history matters very little as long as dull copies of long-gone ‘historical buildings’ are being erected to critical acclaim), 1960s and 1970s modernism is seen as a non-historical eyesore that must be purged from the public space. In this context, Forsaken Modernity was my attempt to set up a platform giving representation to buildings and public artworks that otherwise receive little attention. Some individuals have already acted before me by creating websites with relatively similar aims and scope; Forsaken Modernity was not thought with the aim to ‘do better’, but to provide a different approach. 

 

Forsaken Modernity intends to showcase and legitimize the undeniable value of the modernist and postmodernist legacies. This can only be achieved by showing the subjects through several angles and explaining the rationale (or irrational) behind the visuals. These buildings shouldn’t be reduced to ‘communist monstrosities that look odd’, mere ‘relics of a collapsed empire’. These are nothing but gross oversimplifications that go a long way toward rejecting the fact that these buildings and artworks were the products of men and women, moulded not only by the dictatorship under which they lived but also by external influences which sometimes, indeed more often than one may think, emanated from the other side of the Iron Curtain. 

If the anti-modernists of the East can consistently score easy victories by resorting to the ‘it’s communist’ argument, their Western counterparts are bound to be slightly more creative in their slander campaigns since post-war architecture in the region is not tainted by any obvious political connection. This explains why modernism is ‘marginally’ less hated in the West. Notice the emphasis on ‘marginally’. 

 

Curiously, architecture and public art do not face the same level of rejection even when they originate from the same eras and regimes. If modernist architecture is almost universally treated with contempt, public art pieces or memorials, even the most ideologically charged ones, are currently treated differently from one region to another. Each of these art pieces tells a story. A story of glorification, of figuration, or a simple desire to express an abstract thought. Regardless of the intention behind the creation, Forsaken Modernity is also the story of these mosaics, statues, sgraffitos, etc., and how they managed (or not) to survive the passing of time. 

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Gear

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Most of what you’ll see on this website was shot with a basic Sony A6000 fitted with a 17-135 mm Sony lens. A popular entry-level camera, I acquired mine in mid-2020 from a man who never really used it and wanted to get rid of it. This was more or less supposed to be a transitory situation, yet it turned out to be my camera of choice until I replaced it with a Sony A6600 in January 2023.

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Choice of destination and means of travel
 

All my travels are self-financed and done in my free time. Forsaken Modernity is entirely independent of any institution or organization. 

Destinations are chosen based on their appeals but also on their accessibility. Unfortunately, the last years have been nothing short of disastrous in this regard with the (re)emergence of conflicts that turned regions once open to tourism into closed areas. As much as I would love to cover the fantastic modernist heritage of Moscow, Minsk, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Tiraspol, etc. At the time of writing, these cities are out of reach from regular travelers, especially those carrying a camera. If my experience as a photographer in the East taught me anything, it is that a foreigner carrying a camera in a tense area will almost invariably attract trouble, and no building nor Soviet mosaic is worth being thrown to jail for.