A Photographic Tour Of Russian Corruption
Just last year Transparency International ranked it 33rd-most corrupt of 174 nations. That ranking puts Russia, one of the world's most important countries, on the same level as Kazakhstan, Iran, and Honduras.
This corruption effects people's daily life in countless ways, and that is exactly what photographer Misha Friedman wanted to look at it his new project, "Photo51 — Is Corruption in Russia's DNA?".
Friedman was born in Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union, and moved with his family to New York in the 1990s. After working for Doctors Without Borders in Darfur he began taking photographs, and last year received funding from the U.S.-based non-profit Institute of Modern Russia to spend six months documenting Russian corruption.
"Most people don’t acknowledge this, but corruption in Russia has become its own institution, upon which all other institutions run," Friedman writes in an introduction to the work.
"Without the patron-client transaction, business and education, police and military, medical and judicial operations, don’t happen. With time, it got so I couldn’t pass anything — a building, a traffic intersection, an abandoned farm — without becoming hyper alert to the way it embodied corruption’s creep into every organ of civic society. In a way, my sense of alertness was a mirror for the paranoia and arrogance that weaves corruption so thoroughly into the logistics of people’s daily lives."
Friedman's work is showing in New York at 287 Spring from February 15th, sponsored by the Institute of Modern Russia. We've included a selection of photos here with Friedman's own captions below.