Mother and Daughter, 1977. © Nathan Farb
In June 1977, during the height of the Cold War, American photographer Nathan Farb travelled to the city of Novosibirisk, Siberia, the third-largest city in Russia nestled deep in the South. Farb was travelling as part of Photography USA, part of the United States Information Agency, established as a cultural exchange program under President Carter’s administration.
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Farb brought a four x five Polaroid camera and loads of film to create black and white portraits of visitors throughout the six-week exhibition. “There were as many as five or ten thousand people a day who came to the show,” he remembers. “Everybody wanted to be photographed because they were going to be able to take home a portrait. I could only do 30 or 40 a day as I wanted it to be very precise, like a gold wire that connects one point to another with the least resistance.”
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While his subjects left with a print, Farb kept the negatives for himself, sending them back to the United States in a diplomatic pouch. Upon his return, Farb began publishing the photographs in The New York Times Magazine and in publications around Western Europe, before eventually being compiled in a monograph. The works, which were first exhibited in 1979 at the Midtown Y Gallery, New York, are once again on view in The Russians at The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California, now through April 29, 2018.
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Twins with cowboy hats. © Nathan Farb