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be happy!

by Igor Samolet

Photographs: Igor Samolet

Publisher: Peperoni Books

104 pages

Pictures: numouros color images

Year: 2013

ISBN: 978-3-94-1825-54-3

Price: 25 12.50 €

Comments: 23,5 x 17 cm; Thread Stitched Book in Slipcaser; Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2014 (konzeptionell-künstlerische Fotobände)

›be happy!‹ leads directly into the wild hustle and bustle of a group of young people in Russia. Nightly booze-cruises and parties in deserted demolition houses with unbridled alcohol and drug use, with sex, violence and pornography. The storm of youth rages within the clique going full blast.

Igor´s unleashed lens is part of the action and there when the youngsters love, drink, fight and bandy and when surreal scenes unfold in the light of blazing fire under the night sky in all their complexity. It´s just a wild night.

But Igor stays close to his protagonists even in bright daylight and thus reveals the physical and emotional wounds and injuries. What follows the exuberant celebration is not a regulated everyday life, but a permanent hangover with too many cigarettes, too much alcohol, too much posing and aimless sex, now with kitchen, kids and caboodle between dirty clothes, torn mattresses and boiled potatoes, flickering television and computer screens and washing machines. Until the night swallows the day and the next trip again ends in a coma.

Due to the immediate directness of the photographs, the wise dramatic composition that leads us through two nights and a day, and the clever assembly of documentary and staged shots with cryptic patterns and signs the great agonizing questions shine through under the surface: the longing for truth, love, lust and ecstasy.

Or simply the question about the future.

Mentioned by Parr / Badger THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY Volume III

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