Lise Sarfati defies classification. Too vague to be considered social commentary, too lacking in narrative to be photojournalism and too narrow in focus to be the portrait of a country, Acta Est nevertheless imparts a message about post-communist Russia, and it does so from an original and visually stunning point of view. The images in the first half of this slim volume are architectural studies, mostly of run-down and depopulated industrial sites.
All metal is rusted.
Slowly, images of people, primarily boys and young men, are introduced. Sarfati captures shorn boys in work camps, boys in psychiatric hospitals with crumbling walls, boys staring blankly at the camera in bleak Moscow apartments. The book does not follow a chronology but shuffles human stories together with the architectural photographs to play on themes of decay, neglect and ultimately, transformation. It's a more difficult, painful kind of self-redefinition. For the curious, the introduction by Russian art historian Olga Medvedkova does provide a little insight about the photographs of institutionalized boys.