Images from ‘Beyond the Fall’ tell quite a story
by Mlia Andre
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| New York Times
Magazine, August 15, 1999 |
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For 10 years, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Anthony Suau documented the lives of people in the former Soviet bloc countries. Many of the images made it into the western press; many did not. Now an exhibition of Suau’s work, “Beyond the Fall,” based on the recently published book “Beyond the Fall: The Transition of the Former Soviet Bloc, 1989-1999,” can be seen at the Newseum/NY through June 3.
The show documents the social, political and economic changes that have been occurring in that part of the world and, if anything, his lens has captured the pathos as well as the devil-may-care attitude that most Westerners have never seen.
Suau, who was born in Peoria, Ill., and now lives in Paris, feels strongly that Western governments have continued to misunderstand the people of Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, and hopes his images might help all sides.
Each picture - whether it’s the shot of the bleak automated-teller machine, the first to be installed in 1997 in the town of Lom, in the Czech Republic, or the police raid in an Aziri market in Moscow in 1995 - is a story in itself and the photographer its one true witness.
All I can say is that, leaving the exhibition and coming out onto Madison Ave., I felt as though I had been through a wringer. Thank God for America.
Caption: Photos from Anthony Suau’s “Beyond the Fall” exhibit capture the spirit of the former Soviet-bloc countries. There’s jubilation, above, as the Berlin Wall comes tumbling down on Nov. 11, 1989. Right, a businessman and party girls taste the good life in a Moscow nightclub.
EDITOR'S CHOOSE 2000
Anthony Suau's Dangerious Decade in Russia
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| Time magazine,
May 27, 1996 |
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Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Anthony Suau was covering Eastern Europe for TIME magazine in 1989 when the Iron Curtain fell in a heap of rubble. He decided to stay on to witness the troubled unfolding of the new Russia, from the rise of Boris Yeltsin to the rise of Vladimir Putin. "I realized that this was a big story, and I wanted to tell it from both a historic and human perspective," says Suau. That he did, perhaps better than any other journalist. He has shot everything from the violence in Chechnya to a television game show in Moscow. His work has been gathered in a new book, Beyond the Fall (Liaison Agency Inc.), and featured in exhibitions in New York, Berlin, London and Moscow. "I think the future for Russia, frankly, is very bleak," says Suau, who lives in Paris and keeps an apartment in Moscow. "There are many problems." He says he'll keep shooting there, while taking on new projects --"perhaps back home in the United States."
ANTHONY SUAU
A photojournalist with an eye for the surreal, Suau took these smart photos of Russia in the decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain. One shot shows a dark sedan cruising across a wide avenue that recedes to an onion-domed building as the car’s passenger inspects the photographer. Through June 3. (Newseum, 580 Madison Ave., at 57th St. Open Mondays through Saturdays.)