Sergey Bykov – After Us – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson •

Part of the fun of reviewing photobooks is getting under the hood and taking a book apart to see what makes it work. Sergey Bykov’s photobook After Us is a good candidate for a closer look, as it resists easy analysis. Or rather there is an obvious reading but then the plot thickens as you dive in.

At first glance you read the book as a personal photo album, and that is the basic level on which it operates. It’s Nan Goldin meets Rimbaud meets Francesca Woodman, but in post-Soviet Russia, where life is still nasty, brutish, and short. Raw views of a dark world relieved by flashes of underground bohemian rebellion, friendship, sex, and high jinks. No need for bourgeois conventions or high-brow niceties. Better to burn out than to fade away.

It gets more complicated when you read the author’s extensive texts, a 24-page softcover booklet elegantly tucked inside the front cover. For example, it turns out that many of the photographs were probably taken in Europe, where Bykov has lived and studied photography. And a number of the photos in the book you identify as incidents he writes about. Plus, you begin to recognize some of the people pictured, or at least you have an idea who they might be – his mother, his wife, relatives, close friends, lovers.

Or maybe not his lovers: you can’t tell. Maybe they are someone else’s. Even after you read Bykov’s texts there is an atmospheric fuzziness to the book, as if he can’t be bothered to fully explain. Indeed, perhaps the point of the book is its artfully woven visual fuzz intended as a willful gesture of free artistic self-expression.

A series of self-portraits are sprinkled through the book as a sub-text: Bykov hugging his mother, carrying his wife (or another woman?) piggyback, wearing a dress, as a young man lounging in his underwear, his face as a middle-aged man. But the central idea of the book is likely reflected in its title, After Us. After us, what then? What do we leave behind? What will it have meant? What world will the children and the babies (baby?) pictured in the book inherit?

A handsome, well-crafted example of the photobook as object, After Us blends written texts and some 87 photographs of various formats, styles, and subjects, 36 of them color, into a seamless whole. Am I foolish to wonder if it will eventually attain cult status?

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Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Sergey Bykov – After Us

Photographer: Sergey Bykov (born in 1967 in Kuibyshev, Russia; lives in Russia)

Texts: Sergey Bykov

Language: English

Design: Alexander Paterson-Jones & Jason Eskenazi

Printing and Production: Grafiche Antiga, Italy

Hardbound with illustrated cover; 51 b/w, 36 color photographs; open spine lay flat, section-sewn; pocket with 24-page singer stitch removable booklet; 172 pages, unpaginated; 16.8 x 23.8 cm; ISBN 978-1-7376814-7-2

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.