Cheryomushki - Nikolay Bakharev

As the Soviet Union began to unravel in the early 1980s, Bakharev turned to private portraiture. He traveled to near by river and lake beaches, such as Cheryomushk, where workers and families gathered to relax. These beaches were among the few public spaces in the USSR where any form of nudity was tolerated. “Almost any image of a naked body was considered pornography, which was against the law,” he says. Here, he created a deeply human archive of unvarnished Soviet life: intimate, unguarded portraits of people in moments of quite tenderness—parents embracing their children, couples pressed close, friends drinking in the afternoon light