Russia, in Three Cities and \'7 Rooms\'

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Contradictions lie at the heart of Rafal Milach’s “7 Rooms,” a project that took Mr. Milach, a Warsaw-based photographer, to Russia in search of insights through the ordinary. Though he wanted to avoid clichés â€" vodka drinking, prions, cadet schools, ballets â€" some pictures reflect their Soviet legacy. And although he traveled widely through three cities - Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk - his project didn’t make sense to him until he narrowed his focus to seven individuals.

Those people became his friends. Although many of the portraits are warm and close, some evoke a feeling of distance. A few simultaneously suggest intimacy and a chasm of understanding. In the end, Mr. Milach said he felt he had to lose his way - and his expectations - to find direction.

“When I think of it right now,” said Mr. Milach, who this week was named a grantee of the Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, “I was a totally different person â€" a totally different photographer â€" from when I started.”

Though Mr. Milach is Polish, he has Russian roots. He emphasized a fascination and familiarity with Russia, yet he noted how as time went on he truly understood little of it. It took several months’ worth of trips ! over the course of several years, beginning in 2004, to comprehend fully how little it made sense to him - and to his subjects, too.

Rafal Milach/Institute Krasnoyarsk.

He grew close to his subjects as the project progressed. Like him, they are in their 30s, part of a generation that can recall the collapse of the Soviet Union but did not come of age until afterward, as Russia sought a new way in the chaotic, bare-knuckled transformation into a market-based economy.

The sum of these contradictions presents a complete picture, an exploration of belonging and identity. And part of that exploration involves making sense of the Communist past and the incongruities of the repressive, quasi-capitalist Putin regime.

“You would be surprised,” writes Liza Faktor in her introduction to Mr. Milach’s book, “that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government.”

One of his subjects, Sasha, recalls, “The teacher who used to brainwash us with Soviet propaganda came to the lesson one day and said sadly, ‘Children, it turns out Lenin was a bad person â€" he killed hares while out hunting.’ ”

For the most part, though, the images do not immediately summon perceptions of crisis, either present or past. Perestroika and Communism are little more than abstractions to his subjects, but their portraits tell other stories, and Mr. Milach invites us to fill in that gap.

Rafal Milach/Institute Pervouralsk.

He considers himself a storyteller, and it’s no wonder that he includes selections of prose to precede his pictures, including stories by Svetlana Alexievich, a Ukranian-born Belarusian writer and journalist. Adding quotations from his subjects, the effect was “more like literature than visual stuff at the end of the project,” Mr. Milach said.

Nevertheless, “7 Rooms,” published by Kehrer Verlag, won Best Photography Book in last year’s Pictures of the Year International contest. A new edition of the book, which has its share of pictures of unfathomable cold, is expected this spring. It is a bit contradictory, like a Polish guy making trips to some other country to retrieve a sense of belonging, with strangers he now knows well and recalls fondly.

“It was so beautiful and boring,” Mr. Milach said. “I spent an amazing borin time with them.”

Rafal Milach/Institute Yekaterinburg.

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